Isegoria

Standardized testing is glorious, Bryan Caplan proclaims, but many standardized tests royally suck:

The worst prominent test is almost surely the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). About 9% of test-takers get a perfect score of 170 on the Quantitative part of the exam. A score of 169 puts you at the 87th percentile, and by 166 you’re already out of the top quarter. Most of the STEM majors taking the exam did the relevant coursework in middle school, so for fields that emphasize math, marginally lower scores largely capture not incomprehension but carelessness.

This is especially ridiculous when you remember that only top programs are highly selective. So when the focal standardized exam bunches all the top students together, the exam delivers near-zero value. At least in STEM fields, the point of the GRE is no longer to pinpoint the stars who deserve admission to top programs. The point is to weed out the manifestly unqualified. So the final cut almost has to be grotesquely “holistic.”

The regular SAT math is, by comparison, vastly better. Something like 1% get a perfect score — roughly one-tenth the share that get a perfect score on GRE math. But in absolute terms, the SAT still sucks. At least for STEM students, the problems are easy, so marginally lower scores again primarily capture carelessness rather than incomprehension. Since about two million students take the SAT, roughly 20,000 have perfect math scores — more than enough to fill all the spots in the Ivy League.

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Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.

Out of all the well-known standardized tests, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) best satisfies these conditions. A perfect score is, bizarrely, 528. The fraction that gets a 528 in a given year is about .02%.

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When your goal is to find the best of the best, the ideal test is so demanding that you get a big clump of scores not at the top of the distribution, but at the bottom.

At least one such standardized test exists: the Putnam Competition. As you’d expect, it’s a test of mathematical prowess. To call the test “hard” is a severe understatement: In 2025, the median score was 2 out of 120. Which is historically high! In many years, the median score is exactly 0 for the roughly 4000 test-takers, who are already highly selected. At the other end of the distribution, only five perfect scores have ever been achieved.

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There are many lines of defense in the War Against Merit. The first is to get rid of standardized tests entirely. The second is to go “test-optional.” But if these approaches are too blatantly corrupt, there is a third option. A stealthy way to pretend applicants are far more equal than they truly are.

Just use lousy top-coded tests.

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Admissions to graduate econ programs could be greatly improved simply by requiring the AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics exams. They’re flawed tests, but if you can’t get 5’s on both, you’re not ready for grad school. Indeed, graduate admissions could probably be sharply improved across the board if programs required 5’s on all subject-relevant APs. Would-be historians should have 5’s on the U.S., European, and world history APs just to apply, and would-be literature professors should have 5’s on English literature and language.

In 2001, an overwhelming bipartisan majority passed the worst education policy in decades, Tracing Woodgrains says, No Child Left Behind, a bill based on the idea that all children should be expected to learn at the same pace:

It doled out punishments and rewards to schools based on what percent of students could meet arbitrary thresholds, asserting on the basis of nothing but a wish that it could get all schools to the same arbitrary thresholds within 12 years. This both punished educators serving disadvantaged students—blaming them for the students’ slower paces—and encouraged the systematic neglect of above-average ones—who, after all, were already past the thresholds schools were told to care about. Year after year, it failed to meet its targets. It did not fail because of complex implementation issues. It did not fail because people did not try hard enough. It failed because it was based on a lie: that all kids should learn at the same pace.

At the same time, “detracking”—forcing fast and slow students into the same classrooms and expecting teachers to somehow differentiate instruction—has become the common wisdom among groups of educators like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and in school districts around the country. San Francisco waged a years-long battle to prevent any of its eighth grade students from learning algebra. Cities like Seattle and Boston dismantled their gifted programs.

Often, objective measures of performance themselves become targets, as educators find it easier to smash the thermometers than to change the temperature. Universities perennially look for excuses to abolish entrance tests, kicking against their own findings that those tests work before reluctantly slinking back to them. Activists have waged the same wars against high schools with admissions tests, targeting some of the best free schools in the country—from Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to New York’s Stuyvesant, Philadelphia’s Masterman to San Francisco’s Lowell High School. At the same time states weaken these schools, they often ban alternatives altogether, forbidding charter schools from using comparable tests.

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In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned the most expensive education research project in history, comparing elementary school curricula against each other. One program, Direct Instruction, defied all the conventional wisdom: teachers taught in ability-grouped, orderly classrooms, drilling kids via whole class call-and-answer approaches. When Direct Instruction clearly outperformed the rest on preliminary measures, it was a “horrifying surprise” to many of the established education figures funding the study. As a result of lobbying, the study’s final results aggregated all its programs together, obscuring the success of the most effective approaches and producing a headline result that the study had failed. From there, people moved on.

In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.

That same year, a movement to “detrack” schools—removing advanced classes—took off with the release of Jeannie Oakes’s book Keeping Track. Letting stronger students go faster, Oakes alleged, was inequitable, and before long education schools and education policy circles agreed. That the best evidence at the time indicated that ability grouping helped the strongest students and did not harm the weakest ones did not matter. The consensus had been set.

Good luck finding the smoking gun, Robert Pondiscio says to anyone hunting for waste in the US Education Department:

The agency’s roughly $240 billion annual haul isn’t a slush fund for whimsical bureaucrats — it’s mostly a conveyor belt, dutifully delivering dollars to programs Congress has already blessed.

Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse.

He calls our attention to the Department’s “Dear Colleague” letters to schools and districts:

These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers.

Thinly veiled as “guidance,” they’re closer to a shakedown: Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding.

And when that vision skews ideological — as it often did during the Obama and Biden years — the result is a cascade of spending and disruption that leaves educators scrambling and taxpayers poorer.

All without a single line-item to point to in the federal ledger, much less any measurable benefit to students.

Take the April 2011 Title IX letter on sexual violence. A noble aim — protecting students from harassment — morphed into a bureaucratic sledgehammer.

Schools and colleges were told to adopt a lower “preponderance of evidence” standard for adjudicating cases of alleged campus rape and sexual assault, and to sidestep legal protections like cross-examination of witnesses and accusers.

The result was an explosion in the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each earning $150,000 a year or more. The cost of compliance rose by at least $2 million per year at some universities.

Multiply that across thousands of institutions, and you’re staring at hundreds of millions yearly — state and local dollars, mind you, not Uncle Sam’s — until the letter’s 2017 rescission.

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The Biden administration similarly sought to warp Title IX to its liking. Its 2021 executive order decreed “gender identity” would come under Title IX’s umbrella.

The Education Department dutifully followed up with a “Notice of Interpretation” a few weeks later, nudging schools to toe the line — and shoulder the cost — or risk their federal funds.

Then there was the January 2014 discipline letter, a joint production with the Justice Department that tackled racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions.

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Districts suddenly wary of “disparate impact” on racial minorities embraced trendy fixes like restorative justice, or simply stopped disciplining unruly kids altogether.

Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race.

A conservative estimate of the cost of compliance would be $100 million to $200 million over several years, mostly in urban school districts desperate to avoid a civil rights investigation.

The word “prig” isn’t very common now, Paul Graham notes, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar:

Google’s isn’t bad:

A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.

This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it’s an instance of a much older one.

There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.

The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

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Basically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the Establishment they’d protested against two decades before. Now they were in a position not just to speak out about their ideas, but to enforce them.

A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors. I remember noticing that aspect of political correctness at the time. It wasn’t simply a grass-roots student movement. It was faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty members. In that respect it was like the Cultural Revolution.

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Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase “people of color” is considered particularly enlightened, but saying “colored people” gets you fired. And why exactly one isn’t supposed to use the word “negro” now, even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his speeches. There are no underlying principles. You’d just have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.

The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you’re orthodox you’re better than everyone who isn’t. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.

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One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We’re so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it’s pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn’t expect people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want to share it.

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For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren’t directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it.

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This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence.

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The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money: headlines during his first administration mentioned his name at about four times the rate of previous presidents.

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Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.

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Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It’s not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can’t call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.

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The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we’re up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

We all laughed and laughed at the lunacy of Political Correctness…

Napoleon was conservative about primary education, putting it back in the hands of the clergy, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), but revolutionary in secondary education, which began at age eleven:

In May 1802 he passed a law setting up forty-five lycées (state secondary schools) whose aim was to produce future soldiers, administrators and technicians. The lycée was his answer to the question of how to create a patriotic, loyal generation of future leaders.

All eligible French children were now taught Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics and physics, and also some of the other sciences and modern languages. Here religion was kept to a minimum: he did not want a secondary system dominated by the Church as that of the Ancien Régime had been. Discipline was strict, school uniforms of blue jackets and trousers with round hats were worn until fourteen, and pupils were grouped into companies with one sergeant and four corporals commanded by the best student, who was called the sergeant-major.

Lycées offered 6,400 full-fees scholarships for what were called ‘national students’, but were also open to others who passed exams to enter, and to those whose parents paid fees. Students followed a mandatory programme of courses, instead of the old system where they could choose.

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By 1813 French secondary schools were the best in Europe and some of Napoleon’s original lycées, such as Condorcet, Charlemagne, Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV, are still among the best schools in France two centuries later.