I have been trying to understand how educational achievement as a desirable social benefit was replaced by a dreary political monopoly of overpriced mediocrity that is public education. Medically, education presents as a vestigial organ. Everyone knows it is supposed to be valuable, but that is repeatedly belied by practical experience. As education became “Our Public School System” it has maintained the appearance of value without the underlying reality. How did we go from substance to theater? It took 120 years to transform provably beneficial educational competence into a Trust begging for Busting by Sherman (both M4 tank and anti-trust law).
I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories in general. Garden variety human failure is more than sufficient to circumscribe most problems in life. In the absence of wizards and warlocks, how did we manage to take a functional educational system and transform it into a corrupt bureaucracy that serves itself first and second, with students a distant third at best? As Church Lady Chat says, “Could it be Satan?” Humorous, but not likely.
I propose that serial application of Goodhart’s Law can explain much of the visible system failures. We wanted educated citizens, we measured something nearby, and then we maximized that nearby thing. Twenty years later the measure is useless and another generation of inadequacy is ready to measure something else and try again.
This is not to undermine previous posts on false racial issues, elite control, false narratives and formative sins from Dewey, Horace Mann, and other folks who rhyme with adolph. There are more than enough mistakes to go around.
This post is intended to convey an explanation for the shorter term trends and fashions we have seen sweep through monopoly education with every generation. With this in mind, here is what a century or so of education innovation looks like. Just watch the century unfold:
Institutions measured competence with seat time, creating the K12 mandate with truancy laws, making less than eager students into criminals. And eventually their parents too.
Institutions measured subject mastery with grade completion, pushing schools toward prisons and creating social promotion, while dramatically increasing costs.
Institutions measured K12 school success with student grade averages, creating grade inflation for students and institutions.
Institutions measured K12 educational success with college acceptance rates, destroying trades and any other career choice, while anointing college as the goal instead of an option. The college mandate degraded the value of K12 and added another 5 years to students’ mandatory minimum sentence, with no guarantee of value on release.
Institutions measured college preparedness with various standardized tests and acceptance rates, leading to bias accusations and panic over paths to college without the testing regimen. This reinforced the same failures as relying on college acceptance rates.
With the Claremont decision, Comrade Volinsky measured EVERYTHING in $, distorting tax and spending policy statewide, while eliminating discussion of competence entirely. Schools are now measured by $ per gullet stuffed. Once spending is the goal, and more is better, budgets metastasize, killing the host town and students within it.
Education has far too long a history of transforming measurements into goals followed by ever more abstracted mis-measurement and own goals; all of which is crowding out actual competence while bloating costs. As the system degrades, each generation of students suffers “progressively” more. Its not doing the adults any favors either.
Goodhart’s Law is a timeless reminder of human failure within monopoly systems. Today’s education industrial complex is just AT&T with another 50 years of endemic failure and corruption baked in.
I close with example in detail, by using the SAT to measure college preparedness:
Measure students with the SAT to predict first year academic success in college.
SAT scoring is the goal, abusing statistics to rank students, schools, states, and even nations in false competition.
SAT scoring is demonized as racist restriction on college access.
SAT scoring is normed and re-normed making score comparison meaningless relativism.
SAT scoring is banned from use as an acceptance criterion, since it effectively discriminated between better and worse students. It worked, so its bad.
SAT scoring is implicated as elitist criterion based on language and test construction.
SAT scoring is indicted as a part of elite gaming of acceptance criteria.
SAT scoring is reinstated as a less biased and more representative criterion to predict academic success.
Whew! What a socialist round trip!
Notwithstanding my doubt of dark wizards, Volinsky’s attacks leave me skeptical that the Claremont decision was litigated in good faith. His admitted motive is to impose income taxes by whatever means necessary. He is not kidding.
My intention with this post is to show how even well intentioned efforts can go astray. The feedback loop for such heavy handed social control is too slow and clumsy for real life. Monopoly and Trust protectionism fails. Goodhart’s Law describes some of that failure mechanism.
We need a more responsive system, at the parental and student level. More on that later.
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