I think it's quite a complex issue. Obviously politics has a raw emotional component to it, and other non-rational components too, come to that. But overly fixating on things that we can easily target, test and report on has its risks. You can end up privileging the results of a certain measure or test simply because you can get lots of data on that.

This then produces problems such as action aimed at the artificial target (waiting lists, SAT scores) rather than the underlying issue. The solution to this could well be better, more nuanced targets, of cours... (read more)