but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods.

I wonder how Feynman knew this. The usual source of US reading score data is the NAEP, but AFAIK the earliest nationally representative NAEP results are from 1971 & 1975, and Feynman gave that speech in 1974. (Wouldn't it be painfully ironic if...?)