Completely agree. There was a big shift in education in the early 2000s that brought business-like accountability to schools in the form of metrics. I think tha

Completely agree. There was a big shift in education in the early 2000s that brought business-like accountability to schools in the form of metrics. I think that change alone has led to a hollowing out of our education system that turned it from a nurturing, educational environment into a stressful, performance-focused environment. When you introduce business-like accountability, you need a way to “stack rank” your resources. This process alone is misguided — not all public schools have the same mission, so whatever criteria you come up with removes control of that mission from the local level — and has a lot of second-order consequences. Even in business, all this heavy measurement and reporting causes a ton of overhead — and in schools, this takes the form of standardized testing. This causes a lot of schools to abandon their primary mission — educating students — to pursue a mission of improving standardized test scores by X%. Test prep is hammered home with mountains of homework so teachers don’t get dinged for not challenging students enough. Using business-like incentives (the best-run schools get more budget) is counterintuitive in education: the worst schools need more support, not less. Closing down a low-performing school furthers the goal of meeting the metrics, but often not the goal of educating students. A lot of attention is paid to the impact of this in low-performing schools, but when you give high-performing schools bigger budgets, they just pile more work on the kids as parents apply pressure for intense college prep. So you end up with 2 kinds of schools: one that provides basic services focused on test metrics to keep the little funding they have, and another that has test scores covered through demographic advantages and focuses on college prep because the parents are better educated and more involved in their kids’ lives. Kids are stressed out in both schools — instability and violence in the former, massive expectations and workloads in the latter. But I think the cause is the same: by forcing our kids to operate in a business-like environment, they end up looking a lot like the stressed-out employees of big companies.