The relentless focus on improving test scores through drills and worksheets has backfired. It has demoralized teachers, made students hate subjects like reading and math, and ultimately led to stagnant or declining performance. The cure has become the disease.

The education system is fixated on preventing AI-assisted cheating, missing the larger point: AI is making the traditional "test" and its associated skills obsolete. The focus must shift from policing tools to a radical curriculum overhaul that prioritizes durable human skills like ethical judgment and creative problem-solving.

In the US, parents seek out elite sports teams for the values of hard work, high standards, and supportive coaching. Adopting this same mindset for academics—celebrating rigor and supported struggle—would fix many problems in the education system.

By over-indexing on standardized tests, the education system teaches that every problem has a single correct answer held by an authority. This creates graduates who excel at logic problems but lack the common sense and initiative to solve ambiguous "life problems."

Measuring schools by absolute test scores rewards those that simply select the best students. Measuring by growth rate—the slope of the learning curve—reveals which schools are actually effective at developing students, regardless of their starting point.

The most effective path to civic education may not be more civics classes, but "classical schools" that immerse students in foundational texts. This rigorous approach cultivates thoughtful, rational minds—a more fundamental goal than simply teaching civics.

The education system effectively produces what it was designed for: compliant workers for a rote-job economy. The problem isn't failure, but a failure to adapt its goals from the industrial era to the innovation era, where creativity and initiative are paramount.

Schooling has become a victim of Goodhart's Law. When a measure (grades, test scores) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Students become experts at 'doing school' — maximizing the signal — which is a separate skill from the actual creative and intellectual capabilities the system is supposed to foster.

An expert in educational design argues that K-12 schools are surprisingly more flexible and open to change than higher education. Universities, he contends, are far more 'steeped in their traditions' and slower to evolve, making the K-12 space a more dynamic area for educational innovation.