Doug, thank you for the link to the article. I just spent a few days in Boston with CS Educators at the App Inventor Summit and the issues discussed in this article now make more sense to me.
The CS Principles project (csprinciples.org) looks like a huge step in the right direction. It "could" become the foundation of introductory CS courses in high school (AP) and in post-secondary. They have run 2 years of pilot courses and it looks promising. The next generation AP exam will likely be language agnostic - designs will likely be expressed in pseudocode and the course really engages with students (not just programming).