Ipads are the future!!! And reading is for nerds so we stopped doing it... along with our mindless video games. sigh.

The point-based system is certainly an improvement. I think an enormous amount of progress could be made by moving away from pointless busy work and actually tying achievement in school directly to learning, preferably with a few varied systems to help different learning styles. Is there a reason we haven't seen an open source-like movement in education? Why can't everyone collaborate to produce better resources for less cost? Khan Academy is already providing lessons like that, but a crowdsourced version of the idea seems to have a lot of potential.