Despite nearly 30 years of K-12 school reform efforts, the United States still has substantial gaps in student achievement by race and class. To make more substantial progress, reformers must question conventional assumptions and more aggressively reshape key aspects of the American school system. Five broad pathways could fundamentally improve American schooling: transforming the system by enhancing teacher quality and knowledge, replacing the current system with a set of new actors and institutions, "unbundling" the current system and reassembling it anew, expanding the system by linking school to society, or gradually dissolving the system and connecting students to the world of knowledge. (Contains 7 notes.)