If you want to follow this idea further, I highly recommend Scott's "Seeing Like a State." It's an analysis of how states exert power by imposing legibility--in

If you want to follow this idea further, I highly recommend Scott's "Seeing Like a State." It's an analysis of how states exert power by imposing legibility--insisting on having access and to measuring in certain ways. His thesis is that this legibility is actively corrosive to other properties that don't show up in the measurement. The book starts with an account of how 19th C European forestry managers imposed legibility on their forests in terms of lumber production, and ended up killing off everything but a monocrop, which then collapsed. Eventually he gets around to education, where it's pretty clear there are big externalities to the way we insist on measuring what happens in school. There are broader lessons here for the technocratically-inclined.