A platinum-plated panel of education reformers, innovators and commentators shared the same message today and last night at the colab summit in Atlanta: Our schools are broken.

Sir Ken Robinson  delivered the pronouncement with wit and a British accent. “If you were running a business the way we are running schools — if all your employees packed up their bags every 45 minutes and went into a different room with a different group of people — you would be out of business in a week.”

Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner relayed it with urgency. “For kids, the Internet is their preferred education provider. The Internet never laughs at their questions or says, ‘We don’t have time for that.’”

No one delivered it with the apocalyptic verve of teen wunderkind Nikhil Goyal, who wrote a book about the need to blow up education conventions and start over.

“Schools are comparable to prisons,” the 18-year-old said. “The only difference is that in schools students are paroled at the same time every day. Does school really have to be this horrible, this boring and monotonous thing that you have to wake up every day at 7 a.m. and go to?”

Yes, based on the comments at the conference.

Most speakers talked about how difficult it has been for schools to relinquish their tight grip on control and compliance and embrace — or even consider — new models of flexibility and adaptability that allow students to customize their educations via technology.  A grim faith in conformity, rigid schedules and lockstep learning seems to be programmed into the DNA of  traditional schools, according to the speakers.

Everyone offered lists of essential rules, creeds and guiding principles. A lot those maxims began with the letter C. (C has apparently edged out the letter R, which had its moment with rigor, relevance and relationships.)

Education innovator Will Richardson focused on the importance of computing and connections, noting that kids can seek information and answers to questions from their smart phones and tablets everywhere but in school.

Wagner cited the pivotal role of critical thinking, but said it must be more than a buzz word; it has to be something that teachers and schools can define and point to in their classrooms. His own capsule definition: the ability to ask the right questions, not memorize the right answers.

Diane Laufenberg, former  leader teacher of the esteemed Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, talked about the importance of a school establishing and living up to its core values. Her school’s core values were student-led inquiry reflection, collaboration, research and presentation.

Among the provocative comments at the two-day conference:

Michael Levine, Founding Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, an independent non-profit based at Sesame Workshop: Screen time among school-age kids is up two hours on average in past 5 years. “Kids are spending more time with media than they are at school. The average 4-year-old will end up consuming three hours of media today. The digital learning landscape is less than a decade old. It remains largely uncharted.”

Wagner: “Even a college degree doesn’t guarantee you decent employment; 54 percent of recent college graduates are unemployed or under employed. Kids must be innovators for a more secure economic future. The culture of learning necessary to develop the capacity to innovate is at radical odds with the culture of schools. Learning to make mistakes and fail is part of the profession of being an innovator.”

Brett Jacobsen, head of Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta: “There is gap between a student’s expectation and their experience in school. School has to be meaningful. It has to be experimental. It has to be hands on. In many ways, factories and schools are designed in similar ways; we are mass producing students like products. We are sending them along in an assembly line of grade levels.”

Kenneth Zeff, Fulton County Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer. (Zeff came from Los Angeles where he served as the Chief Operations Officer for Green Dot Public Schools, an award winning charter management organization): “As smart as we are in central office, we don’t have all the answers. Local decision-making is best.”

Bill Strickland, a MacArthur “Genius” Award winner who created a vocational school in inner city Pittsburgh that takes on the kids often deemed hopeless: “I was flunking out of public school, but an art teacher got me excited about clay. He said, ‘You are too smart to die. You are going to college.’ To get him off my back, I filled out an application for the University of Pittsburgh.” Admitted on probation, Strickland graduated with honors and has served as a commencement speaker. “Don’t give up on poor kids; they may be the commencement speakers.”

Ken Robinson: “I wouldn’t presume the whole system is failing. But even kids who succeed will find themselves ill equipped to live in the world. There is this preoccupation now to get everyone to college, but not everyone wants to go to college. I taught in university. I was getting people bouncing around the walls for four years not knowing what they were going to do do.”