Recently, there has been much debate and a flurry of activity at the state and local levels over the Pennsylvania State Board of Education's passage of the Keystone Final Examination proposal. But whether there needs to be a final examination of rigor and relevance for core academic high-school courses is not the right question to ask when we still have a system of public education that is ill-suited to teach all students to proficient levels of knowledge and skills.

It is a given that there need to be fair and reliable examinations of student achievements. However, to expect all of our current or future high-school students to pass the type of test envisioned would require a major redesign of how we teach, assess and re-teach students to proficiency, starting in kindergarten.

Would we expect a school bus to take all of its student passengers to the moon?

Of course not. It just wasn't designed to do that.

To think that a new set of tests could "solve" the performance deficits of public schools is parallel to believing that putting better fuel or a larger engine in a bus would allow it to reach the lunar surface.

A more productive question to address is: How do our public schools become success-oriented organizations for all students and their teachers?

The public schools we and our parents attended were designed to sort students for an economy and way of life that needed a large portion of students to graduate with low-to-medium levels of knowledge to fill low- to medium-skilled jobs. We expected that about 25 percent of students, mostly white males, would pursue a college education.

We accepted thinking that most smart people in math or science had some type of gene that made them that way. Schools functioned to identify and promote these "gifted" and "talented" individuals at the expense of other students. A grade of "A" was not worth much if most students were able to earn one. Students failing and dropping out of school were necessary signs of academic rigor for those who did succeed. Failure was designed into our public schools and experienced by many students.

We now have politicians, business groups and education-policy experts advocating that our public schools prepare all students for post-high-school education or training. We understand that most of today's low- to medium-skilled jobs are being performed either by automation or by people in China, India, Mexico or elsewhere.

Schools now must ensure that all students can apply what they learn in school to real-world situations and that they qualify for higher-skill, higher-paying jobs and careers. When some of our students do not achieve proficiency on one high-stakes test, politicians, business people and others proclaim our public schools to be "broken" and cry for more external accountability.

The system of public education that most students experience today is not broken. Rather, it is not an appropriate system for the new mission of taking all students to higher levels of academic achievement.

We are foolish to believe that we can test our students to academic excellence. Nineteenth-century thinking will not solve a 21st-century challenge. Instead we must craft a 21st-century system of public education that challenges all students to meet high standards of academic knowledge and skills.

We must focus our time, talent and resources on designing public schools where caring teachers use the best teaching practices to deliver rigorous and relevant curriculum. We need to empower our educators to exercise their daily professional responsibilities for positive results.

We need to ask: How do we encourage students to give their best effort to learn every day? How do we support our teachers to successfully address the learning needs of all students? How do we assist parents in being the first and most important teachers of their children while providing physically and emotionally safe environments at home? How do we create adequate, predictable, efficient and equitable funding systems for public education that meet the mandate to adequately educate all students, including those who are learning disabled, living in poverty, learning English as a second language or gifted?

In short, how do we insure that success will be the only option for all of our students?

That is the question!

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.