When school administrators impose top-down mandates for using specific AI systems, it becomes a labor issue. This approach strips teachers of their professional autonomy and control over their work environment, leading to significant demotivation, regardless of the tool's supposed benefits.

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.

When hitting a target is the only path to reward, truth becomes the first casualty. Individuals feel pressure to fabricate data, cherry-pick metrics, and hide negative findings to achieve their goals. The system begins to actively reward dishonesty and punish transparency.

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.

Laws prohibiting "divisive concepts" and increasing parental oversight create a climate of fear. To protect their jobs, teachers avoid controversial topics, leading them to intentionally "keep it vague, default to bland"—in short, to teach poorly.

A key driver of Mississippi's praised reading scores was a policy preventing low-performing third graders from advancing. This effectively removed the bottom 10% from the fourth-grade test pool, artificially inflating the state's average scores and masking true progress.

Individual professors are disincentivized from grading rigorously because students will avoid their classes, negatively impacting their evaluations. This collective action problem means that meaningful reform, such as mandating a 'B' average, must be implemented centrally and uniformly across the institution.

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.