With the accelerating pace of social and technological change, the World Economic Forum estimates that 65 percent of children today will end up in careers that don't even exist yet.

But there's a problem: Our education system functions much as it did in the 20th century, when its main purpose was to prepare factory workers, according to Paul Reville.

Reville, a former Massachusetts education secretary, joined Boston Public Radio on Tuesday to discuss his new book, "Broader, Bolder, Better:How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty," written with Elaine Weiss of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, which calls for sweeping change in the education system.

"We've organized our work into silos, so we have this school silo in which we said, not only are you going to be confined to learning the three Rs, but if you learn the three Rs, then presto, we'll have a meritocracy," Reville said. "Talent and effort will rise to the top and then we don't mind if people get treated unequally by the market: some people get rewarded highly because they work harder and are smarter than others.

"But what we haven't really thought about in the 21st century — It was one thing in the early 20th century when you had to educate people, for the most part, to do routine low-level, low-skill, low-knowledge factory jobs, and you put a one-size-fits-all school system in place," he said. "But we basically kept this model and built our lives fragilely around a model that really doesn't make much sense in terms of the 21st century, and it's difficult to change it."

Reville and Weiss argue in their book for a large-scale expansion of school-community partnerships in order to provide student support starting from early childhood all the way to the working world, including traditional wraparound services like mental health and nutrition supports, as well as early childhood education, after-school and enrichment programs, and family support.

"If you happen to be born into affluence, you have all kinds of supports, beginning in prenatal nutrition, stable housing, being read to, a sense of safety, medical care, mental health, after school, summer school, all these things," said Reville. "If you don't happen to come by that through the accident of birth, you're at a disadvantage, and school as it's currently constituted treats everybody the same. So it's difficult for kids who haven't had that advantage to catch up with those who have."

Paul Reville is a former Secretary of Education and a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education where he also runs the Education Redesign Lab.

This article has been updated to reflect the correct title of Reville and Weiss' book. It is "Broader, Bolder, Better," not "Broader, Better, Bolder."