I'll single out one facet of education, and that is mathematics. The pinnacle of pre-college math study is calculus. Arthur Benjamin(of Mathemagics fame) in my view has a simple solution for math education in school. Rather than making calculus the pinnacle, you make statistics the pinnacle. These days I feel that school doesn't teach what regular people need for life skills. We use statistics and probability every day in one form or another. Arthur Benjamin gave his talk about this at a TED convention, and it can be found here: ere
http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html . I think if people start breaking down education into core areas and start finding solutions to more specific problems that plague educational system. Art has a simple, but good idea.