The real data on education is more than bad enough, Max Tabarrok says, to merit removing or reforming the Department of Education:
Inflation adjusted spending per pupil tripled since 1970 while reading scores haven’t budged.
There has also been an astounding amount of credential inflation. The amount of time people spend in school has increased by more than three years since the 1970s as more people graduate high school and college, but performance on tests of skill or human capital is completely stagnant.
This suggests, a la Bryan Caplan’s Case against education, that many of these extra years of schooling are actually a socially inefficient zero-sum competition where it pays individually to get the most schooling and come out on top of your peers, but everyone would be better off if people invested less time and money in competing. Hundred billion dollar subsidies to student loans and higher education institutions have exacerbated this zero-sum race for little material gain.
Evidence for this: The NCES ran two rounds of a literacy test, one in 1992 and one in 2003. The overall average score on the test didn’t change (276 vs 275 out of 500), but within every educational attainment group scores dropped massively.
High school dropouts got less literate on average because the highest scoring dropouts in the 90s became the lowest scoring graduates in the 2000s as standards were lowered and more students were pushed through into more education. Literacy scores among Graduate degree holders dropped by 13-17 points in a decade. If a graduate degree cannot even teach you how to read, it’s probably not having large effects on any other more complex forms of human capital.
This means that across this decade of rising educational attainment, no one improved their reading skills at all. Instead, the standards for graduating from each level of schooling were just lowered and people spent more years slogging through high school or college.
Well, duh. It started as a way to circumvent the separation of Church and State, and it ended as pure cancer. What else could happen?
Speaking of cancerous institutions, NASA by now does little beyond ManBearPig theatrics and junkets for fattening chicks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160215020246/www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/2/11/celebrating-women-in-science
And so on, and on.
Since the contents of a cesspool naturally flow downhill, the same usually is true for all vassals and imitators of USA. But everyone who paid attention already knows that.
Now, who is supposed to do this «removing or reforming»? It will just happen, or what?
So far, those who did invariably opted for reforming. Which is how the things ended this way. Because “reforming” tend to be much like Moldbug described: «If you wanted to convert Tony Soprano’s mob into an actual, legitimate waste management company, what would you do, start by replacing Paulie Walnuts with some guy from McKinsey?»