A foundational paper by IER Chairman David Loader OAM. Loader argues that Australian schooling produces unacceptably unequal outcomes and that the standard responses, better buildings, stronger leadership, tighter management, miss the deeper structural problem. Drawing on Teese, Kozol, Hargreaves and Ritchhart, the paper makes the case for a community-focused, student-focused and society-focused redesign of schooling, and offers six alternative metaphors for what a school could be: parking lot, shopping centre, studio, network, game community, and house. The piece is a useful companion to IER’s current work because it names, twenty years before the present debate, the limits of working within the inherited model and the cost of treating the school as a closed system.