Dell Computers used to use the tagline, “Dude, you got a Dell!”
At the time, Dell was making some of the best computers in the world, so it made sense to lean into its brand this heavily. Then Dell went public, accountants put short term profits ahead of quality and performance, and within a few years people would ask, “Dude, you got a Dell?!?”
In business and economic circles, things like company reputation and brand recognition are collectively known as ‘goodwill,’ and a company’s goodwill is measurable value. If a company lives off that goodwill for very long, however, without continuing to do the things that earn it, it does not take long before its goodwill runs negative and its reputation collapses. This is precisely what happened to Dell.
If the world were fair, Singapore would have the wealthiest population on Earth, followed by Macao, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, as according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), these nations have the best performing education systems in the world.
The United States comes in at 18th place by that metric.
The United States is the fifth wealthiest nation on Earth, when measured by median individual income, behind just Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Norway, and Switzerland.
The reason we are one of the richest nations on Earth, in spite of the fact that we are not one of the best educated, is that the world is not fair. The UAE does not lead in education either (they are worse than we are), but it has oil, as does Norway. Luxembourg and Switzerland are rich because they are small nations with economies dominated by international banking.
Every nation where people make more money than the United States is small, and is dominated by one industry. We are big with a diverse economy, so why are we wealthy?
The answer is that we are the Dell of nations, living on a reputation we no longer earn.
Education level is of course not the only thing that drives incomes, but if income levels went to the people who most deserve it, how well educated the population is would be one of the clearest indicators of who deserves to be paid, as education is driven by a combination of intelligence and effort.
We, as a nation, do not deserve to make anywhere near as much as we do. There are individuals who do, but we are collectively overpaid, by a wide margin.
We are the national equivalent of King Charles II of Spain, who inherited the largest and wealthiest empire on Earth, but through incompetence and arrogance, caused one of the greatest and most rapid national declines in human history, leading to the War of Spanish Succession and the end of the Spanish Age.
It did not have to be this way. Once upon a time, American education was the envy of the world, producing generation after generation of Americans who deserved to be the best paid population on Earth. We inherited their wealth, and their salary expectations, but we live on a reputation we no longer earn. As with Dell, when our reputation collapses our incomes will go with it.
Education is the primary transmission mechanism through which competence is passed from generation to generation. This essay will discuss why our education system is failing, and then explain how to fix it.
When American Education Actually Worked
For most of American history, the United States did not have a national education system. There was no federal department setting curriculum, defining standards, or determining what children should believe. Education was instead a state and local responsibility, shaped by communities, churches, civic institutions, and families.
We did not have an education system at all. We had thousands of them, spread across the nation.
The Constitution grants the federal government no explicit authority over education. Schooling developed organically, with states setting broad frameworks and local communities exercising primary control over curriculum, discipline, expectations, and funding. School boards were local. Teachers were known personally, and parents could see outcomes directly. If a teacher had a problem with a student, the parents generally supported the teacher.
In this system, education was subject to feedback.
Families with children could, and often did, move to communities with better schools. Communities with strong schools attracted families, raised property values, supported millages, and watched their tax base expand. Communities with weak schools lost residents and revenue. The consequence was unavoidable: poorly performing schools created immediate, visible costs for the communities that tolerated them.
This dynamic produced competition, and not in the abstract sense, but in the most practical one possible. Communities competed for families. Success was rewarded with growth, while failure demanded reform.
There was no central authority smoothing over disparities or redefining failure. Performance was not negotiated. It was observed.
As a result, American education evolved in a way that closely resembled what modern Lean methodology would have formalized, had lean been used.
Decision-making occurred close to the point of value creation. Feedback loops were short, and accountability was real. When a school failed to educate its students, the consequences were not buried in reports or reinterpreted through political frameworks. They were felt directly by parents and taxpayers.
This decentralized system produced uneven results, as all functional systems do. Some schools were better than others. Some communities invested more heavily in education. Some teachers were exceptional, others less so.
Variation was not a defect. It was information that allowed families to choose, and that forced communities to adapt around best practices.
Communities that had other ideas were free to experiment, just as in lean manufacturing a plant engineer will experiment with processes, but in lean we measure the results, and we only keep the changes that work. Market pressures forced the same thing with education in that experiments that failed never became a part of the best practices.
Crucially, standards in those days were functional rather than ideological. Literacy meant reading. Numeracy meant arithmetic. History meant knowing what happened – accurately and without political narrative thrown in. Success was measured by whether students could perform these tasks, and not by how they felt, or whether outcomes conformed to predetermined distribution patterns.
By the early twentieth century, this system had produced results unmatched anywhere in the world. The United States achieved mass literacy, widespread secondary education, and the world’s most productive universities.
American workers powered the Industrial Revolution, while American scientists and engineers led the world in innovation. American higher education became the global standard and none of this required a federal education bureaucracy.
It worked because incentives were aligned, and because Communities bore both the cost of failure and the rewards of success. Schools could not hide poor performance behind administrative language or shifting standards, giving parents real choices.
In modern terms, the United States had the world’s most effective education system because it was the one that most closely adhered to Lean principles and free-market accountability.
This was not a perfect system. No real system is. It was, however, an honest one, and the honesty of the system, more than fairness rhetoric or centralized control, is what allowed it to work.
We have not lost everything yet, either. To this day, eight of the top ten universities in the world, as ranked by US News and World Report, are in the United States (the other two are in England), as are 80 of the top 100.
The Myth That Federal Control Was Necessary
A common claim in modern education policy is that federal control was necessary to achieve equal access, and that without national management of education, local systems would inevitably perpetuate injustice.
That claim does not hold up to the historic record, and this was made explicit in 1957 during the crisis at Little Rock Central High School.
When Arkansas officials defied a federal court order to integrate the school, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and deploying federal troops to ensure that the law was obeyed.
This intervention was decisive and unambiguous, but it was also narrow. Once the court order was enforced and students were admitted, federal involvement did not expand into curriculum design, school governance, educational philosophy, or other things related to running schools. The federal government just enforced the 14th Amendment, and withdrew.
Eisenhower did not regard education as a federal responsibility. The Constitution provided no such authority, and he took that limitation seriously. At the same time, he believed unequivocally in the supremacy of federal law and the obligation of the federal government to enforce constitutional rights when states refused to do so. Those two positions were not in tension for him, because he understood our federalist system.
Eisenhower proved that equal access could be compelled without dismantling local accountability or replacing community governance with national bureaucracy.
After the launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower supported increased federal investment in science, mathematics, and engineering education through scholarships and research funding, but this too was targeted and limited, and in the long run, probably a mistake, as though it provided resources to address a specific strategic concern, when the program was later expanded under Carter to underwrite all student loans, the cost of secondary education began to grow much faster than inflation such that today, college is unaffordable for most people without going deeply into debt.
Prior to Carter, college had always been something someone working part time could afford without taking on debt. Putting federal debt guarantees on all student loans gave universities every reason to start charging as much as possible, with no forethought for what students could later afford. This is precisely what they did.
The historical record shows that equal access did not require federal control of education. It only required enforcement of the law. The model that emerged later inverted that logic such that instead of correcting specific injustices and preserving local responsibility, federal policy increasingly assumed that the only way to address inequality was through permanent national management.
This shifted authority upward, and took accountability away from local governments. Education was transformed from a local institution into a federal political instrument.
By any objective standard, the nationalization of our education system has failed.
Federalization, Incentives, and the Inversion of Accountability
Once education began to be federalized, accountability inverted. Responsibility no longer flowed upward from classrooms to communities, but downward from Washington to schools. This shift did not happen all at once, nor did it require malicious intent. It occurred through funding leverage.
Federal dollars increasingly came with conditions, reporting requirements, and compliance frameworks that reshaped how schools behaved. Local responsibility for outcomes was replaced by administrative responsibility for meeting federally defined criteria. Schools were no longer primarily accountable to parents and communities, but to distant authorities who controlled funding streams.
Centralized systems cannot operate on trust, so teachers lost autonomy as national standards were developed. Administrators were tasked with translating federal requirements into local practice, which meant prioritizing documentation, reporting, and alignment, over instruction.
Bureaucracy expanded as a necessity of managing a national system, and at the same time, performance declined. This was not coincidental. Systems optimized for compliance do not optimize for learning.
This outcome is predictable in both Lean methodology and economics. In Lean systems, it is well understood that you get what you measure such that if you measure the wrong things, you get the wrong things. In economics, the parallel principle is that you get what you incentivize. These are not slogans. They are descriptions of how systems behave. Measurement becomes incentive the moment it is tied to reward or punishment, and incentives shape behavior regardless of stated intentions.
As federal involvement expanded, the Department of Education increasingly defined what counted as success. Those definitions became embedded in funding formulas and accreditation standards.
Schools adapted rationally and optimized for what was measured. Over time, this reshaped the entire process of education.
Academic mastery is difficult to standardize and slow to measure. Emotional states, behavioral indicators, and compliance metrics are far easier, so invariably the system gradually deprioritized thinking in favor of proxies that were administratively tractable.
Teaching also moved from questions that forced students to think, such as “At what point did WWII become inevitable,” to questions that were easy to measure, such as “In which of the following years did Japan bomb Pearl Harbor?”
Note the difference. I might answer the first question with the invasion of Manchuria, Chamberlain’s peace treaty with Hitler before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland, the invasion of France, or some other event of the student’s choosing. If the student can defend their choice, they get a good grade.
The second question can only be answered by coloring in the circle next to ‘1941’.
Thinking is inherently uncomfortable. It produces disagreement, uneven outcomes, and variance. Research leads to unpredictable conclusions, and challenges authority.
Feeling, by contrast, is measurable and uniform. Belief can be standardized. Approved answers are safe. In a centralized system, these characteristics matter more than truth or rigor, as they are easy to measure and categorize. The result is that education shifts, not by decree, but by incentive, from teaching students how to think to teaching them how to feel, and from encouraging inquiry to transmitting belief.
Indoctrination enters the system, not as a conspiracy, but as an equilibrium. Centralized bureaucracies cannot tolerate sustained variance or dissent without destabilizing themselves.
Independent thinking undermines administrative predictability. Belief systems do not. Belief systems can be certified, audited, standardized, and enforced. Ideological conformity becomes the safest instructional output to minimize friction within the system.
Teachers and administrators who comply are rewarded. Those who resist encounter professional risk. Over time, conformity replaces competence as the defining trait of success.
Equity frameworks accelerate this process by redefining variation as injustice.
Any system that works will produce disparate outcomes. People differ in ability, effort, interest, and circumstance, even with themselves on different days. People will of course always differ from other people, yet equity, as operationalized in modern education policy, treats those disparities as defects.
Where there is a difference between groups, that’s not racism. It’s just information. If Asian and Indian kids perform better in school than do other groups, on average, the solution is to determine why, and then to help the lower performing groups have whatever it is that helps Asian and Indian kids generally do better.
The difference in this case has been studied. It relates to having cultural norms that focus more on education (and STEM fields), and to having a higher percentage of two-parent households, than do the lower-performing groups.
Once disparity is labeled injustice, the mechanisms that produce excellence must be dismantled to make the disparity go away. Advanced tracks are eliminated, standards are softened, discipline is reframed, and failure signals are suppressed. Outcomes converge, but only by moving everyone to the bottom.
I tell people at work all that time that if everything has an urgent status, then by definition nothing has an urgent status, as the status of everything is exactly the same. The same is true in education: when George W. Bush said, “no child left behind,” it also meant, “no child moves ahead.”
People make this a partisan issue, but there is plenty of blame on both sides. It should not be a partisan issue. It’s a broken system that needs to be fixed.
None of this requires bad actors, either. It requires only incentives aligned against truth. Federalization inverted accountability, measurement redefined success, indoctrination stabilized the system, and equity provided moral justification for suppressing excellence. Together, they transformed education from a system that produced competence into one that manages belief. The decline that followed did not need to be the intended result as it was designed into the structure.
Our system can produce nothing else.
The Institutional Failure of Teaching and the Problem of Repair
Education is a recursive system. Its outputs become its future inputs. Students educated under one set of standards eventually become the teachers, administrators, and policymakers who define the next generation’s standards. It will always compound.
When an education system functions well, this recursion compounds competence. When it degrades, it compounds decline.
Teachers entering the profession today were themselves educated under weakened standards; and shaped by a system that increasingly emphasized compliance, emotional affirmation, and ideological alignment, over rigorous thinking. Many were never taught how to reason, challenge assumptions, or pursue truth independently. Those skills had already begun to disappear by the time they entered classrooms as students, and you cannot teach what you do not possess.
Lean teaches that people do what the system is designed to do, so the result is an institutional failure rather than a human one.
Individual teachers may be intelligent and hardworking. Their inherent worth is not in question. What has been lost is institutional competence: the shared capacity to recognize rigor, enforce standards, grow competence, and transmit intellectual discipline across generations.
When that competence erodes, good intentions cannot compensate for missing skills, and effort is misdirected toward the wrong objectives.
This recursive decay makes the problem unusually difficult to fix.
Policy changes alone are insufficient. Policies operate on institutions that no longer have the internal capability to execute them well. Reversing a regulation does not restore lost judgment anymore than eliminating a mandate recreates intellectual habits that were never formed.
The system lacks the human capital required to respond effectively to reform, even when reform is correctly designed.
Generational decay also creates path dependence.
Once standards have been lowered long enough, raising them produces friction rather than improvement. Students struggle, teachers resist, administrators retreat, and the system interprets discomfort as evidence of injustice rather than evidence of rigor. Reform begins to look cruel rather than corrective, and pressure mounts to abandon it.
Rebuilding competence is therefore far harder than changing policy. It requires retraining, reprioritization, the reestablishment of norms that reward excellence rather than conformity, and in some cases it requires replacing teachers who fail.
Teacher’s unions will fight this.
Some attrition is inevitable. Not everyone currently in the system will be able or willing to meet higher standards. Any serious reform effort must accept this reality, or it will fail before it begins.
The uncomfortable truth is that the longer institutional decay persists, the more costly repair becomes. Delay compounds the damage. What once could have been corrected through incremental adjustment now requires structural rebuilding. This is the price of allowing a recursive system to drift for too long without honest feedback or meaningful accountability.
Consequences of Continued Decline
The consequences of continued educational decline are not abstract, and they are not confined to classrooms. They propagate outward into the economy, the culture, and the institutions that depend on a competent population to function. Education is upstream of nearly everything that determines national strength. When it fails, it affects everything.
The most immediate consequence is falling productivity.
Productivity growth depends on a workforce capable of learning new skills. Employees need to adapt to technological change, and to solve problems that do not have prepackaged answers.
When education emphasizes compliance over competence and belief over inquiry, workers become less adaptable and less innovative.
Systems can continue to function for a time on inherited processes and accumulated capital, but the ability to improve them, and eventually even to maintain them, erodes. Over time, economic growth slows, not because people work less, but because they are less able to work effectively.
At the same time, intellectual flexibility gives way to ideological rigidity.
A population trained to absorb approved narratives rather than evaluate evidence becomes brittle. Disagreement is experienced as threat rather than stimulus. Complex problems are reduced to moral slogans, and policy debates harden into identity conflicts.
This rigidity is the predictable outcome of an education system that rewards belief alignment and punishes independent thought. Once people are no longer taught how to think, they cannot easily revise their views when reality changes.
This intellectual rigidity produces fragile citizens. Students educated in environments that prioritize emotional safety over intellectual challenge are poorly prepared for failure, uncertainty, and disagreement. They enter adulthood with high expectations and low resilience, confident in their moral certainty but unpracticed in actual work.
When confronted with adversity, such people seek validation rather than solutions. They enjoy authority but not responsibility. This fragility is often misdiagnosed as compassion. In reality, it is a lack of preparation.
Institutions depend on competent individuals who can exercise judgment, tolerate ambiguity, and place truth above convenience, making it only natural for decay to follow. When competence becomes rare, institutions fill the gap with rules, procedures, and enforcement mechanisms.
Bureaucracy expands to compensate for missing trust and competence. Decision-making slows. Accountability diffuses. Organizations become more concerned with protecting themselves than fulfilling their purpose. This decay is visible across public and private institutions alike, and education is the common upstream cause.
The final consequence is the eventual loss of prosperity.
Wealth is sustained by productivity, innovation, and institutional competence. When those inputs decline, prosperity does not vanish immediately, but it does become increasingly fragile. Economic shocks become harder to absorb, and competition becomes harder to meet. Living standards stagnate and then fall.
At that point, political conflict intensifies as groups compete over a shrinking pie, and the cycle accelerates.
None of these outcomes are inevitable unless the current trajectory continues. Education determines whether a society reproduces competence or consumes it. Continued decline guarantees the latter.
Lean Education
If we could build an education system from scratch, the best way to do so would be to start with the students. How many students do we have that need to be taught? Once we know the number of students, we would ask the next question: how many teachers do we need to teach the number of students we have? Next we would ask how many administrators we need to support that number of teachers. After that, you just need the buildings and the materials.
Instead, we build education systems from the top down, hiring a school board and a superintendent. The school board and superintendent then decide how much staff they need and how many administrators they want. The administrators then decide how many teachers they need, and by the time we get to the students, the money is gone.
Drive past your community school administration building. I’ll bet it looks a lot nicer than any of your community schools.
A lean education system would reverse this order entirely. The student would once again be the customer, not in the consumerist sense, but in the functional one.
The purpose of the system would be to educate students, not to sustain administrative structures or advance ideological goals. Every role in the system would exist to support learning, and any role that could not be tied directly to that purpose would be considered waste and removed.
Measurement would also change. A lean system measures what matters, and in education, what matters is thinking.
Everyone thinks that the primary purpose of educating children is learning. Even back when we had the world’s best education system, people would talk about “Reading, writing, and arithmetic,” but really, the most important thing we teach students in school is how to figure things out, and in a bureaucratic system, such as what the Department of Education gives us, the first thing children lose is that.
The ability to reason, analyze, synthesize information, and arrive at defensible conclusions is the core output of education. These qualities are harder to measure than emotional states or behavioral compliance, but difficulty is not an excuse. Measuring feelings produces students skilled at expressing approved sentiments. Measuring thinking produces students capable of engaging reality. A system that cannot tell the difference will inevitably select the wrong outcomes, every time.
Accepting real measurement means accepting disparity.
Any system that teaches effectively will produce uneven results, because students differ in ability, effort, and interest. Disparity is not evidence of injustice. It is evidence that learning is occurring.
A lean education system does not attempt to equalize outcomes. It attempts to maximize competence, and it allows results to fall where they may. When disparity is treated as a failure, excellence becomes impossible.
Disparity is information to learn from so we can improve. That is all it is.
Rebuilding such a system would also require rebuilding teacher competence. This does not mean denigrating teachers as people. It means acknowledging that many entered the profession having never been trained in rigorous thinking themselves.
A lean system would invest heavily in teacher development, but through mastery of subject matter and critical thinking skills. Some teachers would thrive under this model. Others would not. That distinction is unavoidable, and avoiding it guarantees failure.
Authority and accountability would have to be decentralized.
Decisions about instruction, standards, and discipline belong as close to the classroom as possible. Local control shortens feedback loops and makes responsibility visible. When schools fail, communities should feel the consequences. When they succeed, they should reap the rewards. Centralized systems obscure both, replacing responsibility with process and outcomes with excuses.
Finally, a lean education system would eliminate structures whose primary function is to manage belief rather than produce knowledge.
This starts with the Department of Education.The Department of Education must be eliminated.
People will say this is a radical idea, but we did not even have a Department of Education until 1980, and the Department of Education is the root of the issue that made American education fail.
Education exists to transmit competence, not to shape ideology. Any system designed to enforce conformity of thought, suppress disagreement, or privilege approved conclusions over honest inquiry is incompatible with learning. Such systems may be stable, but they are sterile. They produce compliance, not understanding.
None of this is radical. It is simply a return to first principles. Lean systems begin with purpose, align incentives with outcomes, and eliminate anything that does not add value. Applied to education, those principles point in one direction, and that direction leads toward students, toward thinking, and toward truth. Anything that pulls the system away from those ends should be treated as waste.
Dell did not collapse because computers stopped mattering. It collapsed because the company stopped doing the things that made its reputation true. For a time, goodwill masked the decline and customers still bought the brand, but goodwill is not permanent. Once it runs out, reality asserts itself quickly, and without mercy.
The United States is in the same position. We did not become wealthy because of DEI or ESG scores, but because we built a population capable of thinking clearly, and working competently. Our people knew how to improve the systems it inherited.
That competence was transmitted through education. Over time, we stopped reproducing it, but we continued to collect the returns as if we had not.
For decades, we treated education as a political instrument rather than a competence factory. We centralized authority, inverted accountability, redefined success, and replaced thinking with belief. We told ourselves that outcomes mattered more than standards, and that excellence was suspect if it produced unequal results. In doing so, we consumed the very goodwill that prior generations created.
The bill for that decision has not yet fully come due, but it will.
Productivity will continue to stagnate. Institutions will continue to weaken. Prosperity will become harder to sustain. When reality finally overwhelms reputation, the adjustment will be abrupt.
This decline is not inevitable. It is the result of choices, and different choices produce different outcomes.
A lean education system would restore the student as the customer, measure thinking rather than feelings, accept disparity as evidence of learning, rebuild teacher competence, decentralize authority, and eliminate structures designed to manage belief instead of produce knowledge.
The question is not whether we can afford to do this. The cost is one of the primary ways this idea will be criticized, as it will cost a lot less than what we do today and will be attacked as ‘anti-education’ as a result.
Politicians never mention when they point out that we are the 18th best in the world at educating children, our per-capita costs are at least twice as high as anyone else on the list. Politicians treat cost as a measure of caring, but functional systems don’t cost more – they usually cost a lot less.
Nations, like companies, do not remain successful out of habit. They remain successful only if they continue to earn the reputation they trade on.
We are still living on the work of our predecessors. If we continue to treat education as something to be administered rather than something to be earned, and if we continue to build a compliant workforce rather than a competent one, the world will eventually ask the same question of us that it once asked of Dell:
“Dude, you hired an American?!?”
