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.

Critics cite Stride's lower standardized test scores versus brick-and-mortar schools as a sign of failure. This is misleading, as Stride's students are often already underperforming or have disabilities and health issues. The correct metric is progress against their own baseline, not against the general school population.

The federal government's performance management system is broken by grade inflation, with over 80% of employees receiving top ratings. This makes it impossible to differentiate performance, leading to bonuses being spread thinly across the board and failing to meaningfully incentivize top talent or address underperformance.

Joe Liemandt reveals that students from elite private schools, despite having A's, are often years behind grade level when objectively assessed. This systemic grade inflation misleads parents and makes it nearly impossible for these institutions to adopt transparent AI tutors that would expose these deficiencies.

A policy at Stanford offering advantages like extra time for disabled students has resulted in half the student body claiming disability status. This illustrates how well-intentioned policies can create perverse incentives that undermine meritocracy.

In school, an 80% score is a "B," but in sports, a 20% failure rate on a basic skill is unacceptable. Alpha School applies a sports-like definition of mastery, where students must know concepts "cold" before advancing, preventing the compounding knowledge gaps that plague traditional education.

The mass rollout of laptops in schools since 2012 has devastated the educational outcomes for the bottom 50% of students. While high-performing students can manage the distraction, those with weaker executive function cannot, leading to an overall decline in national test scores. The investment in EdTech has had a net negative effect.

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.

Despite average test scores on a consistent exam dropping by 10 points over 20 years, 60% of all grades at Harvard are now A's, up from 25%. This trend suggests a significant devaluation of academic credentials, where grades no longer accurately reflect student mastery.