Keynote speaker Linda Darling-Hammond offers an eye-opening wake-up call concerning America’s future and illustrate what the United States needs to do to build a system of high-achieving and equitable schools that ensure every child the right to learn. Drawing on her latest book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, Darling-Hammond confronts the antiquated philosophies, teaching methods, and structures of American public schools, describing our system as the “factory model” established over a century ago to meet the needs of a very different world. This system did not envision the forces shaping the learning needs of children today: globalization, growing diversity, the diversification of skills, the breathtaking expansion of knowledge and speed of its transmission, and the relentless demand for problem solving and creativity.