Having lived in a lot of these areas it's a real bummer to have a bunch of empty strip malls or empty malls along all the streets. I see his point too about work force entry. Where are kids supposed to start? We're not all entrepreneurs.

For the kids headed to Stanford and Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the way ahead is, for the moment, fairly clear. For the dead-average 17-year-old who intends to — maybe has to — move out of his parents’ house next year and into a life of self-sufficiency, who not long ago might have gone down to the local Sears or Circuit City or hardware store and started a new job 24 hours after asking for it? That way is less clear. But what is quite clear is that our current system of education, which focuses the great majority of its energy and resources on those students at the very top of the performance curve and those at the very bottom, is not doing very much for those in the middle. It is as relevant to the 21st century as an Orange Julius or a Chess King outlet — dead as Heritage Park Mall, even if it doesn’t know it yet.