I think you've done better than CarlShulman and V_V at expressing what I see as the most fundamental problem with EA: the fact that it is biased towards the easily- and short-term- measurable, while (it seems to me) the most effective interventions are often neither.

In other words: how do you avoid the pathologies of No Child Left Behind, where "reform" becomes synonymous with optimizing to a flawed (and ultimately, costly) metric?

This issue is touched by the original post, but not at all deeply.