Given that technology is supposed to increase efficiency (meaning fewer can do the work of more) I'm not sure that jobs are a great measure of educational success, or even the ideal goal of education.

We've seen the transition from almost all of society being involved in primary production to a small minority working in "big agriculture". Broad swathes of industry (construction, manufacturing, transport & logistics) being replaced by machines. Why do we assume there will even be a demand for labour which meets the needs of 90%+ of the population in 10 years time?

Often the counter-argument raised to this point is that "other jobs" will replace those which become defunct through new technology - instead of someone picking the crops by hand, they will maintain the harvesting machine. It seems to me there is a natural ceiling on the amount of productive work available before people simply end up rent-seeking/extracting value without creating anything in return - ie. trading futures on those crops, suing one another for selling dubious financial products which benefit no-one, and acting as social media liaison officers for the agro-business, financial services firm and law firm in question.

In my view optimising the education system to produce these outcomes (and then congratulating ourselves when everyone is gainfully "employed") misses the point by a fair margin.

Despite plenty of attention and funding, test scores continue to get worse. It's pretty clear that we have no idea what the solution to the education problem is. So it makes the most sense to try as many different things as possible until we stumble on a solution by accident.

So let every school try their own thing. Publish long-term metrics. Let parents choose where to send their children.

Standardization and centralization of school funding are part of the problem at this point. Tests are great at measuring -- until they become standardized and high-stakes, at which point the pressure causes teachers to start spending all their time "teaching to the test."

Also, many people have an incorrect assumption that every child has the same destiny. The very name of Bush's education masterpiece, "No Child Left Behind," implies that you'll dumb things down to the level of the worst student in the class. High school career counseling often pushes college on students who simply aren't cut out for it, while perfectly honorable but less prestigious life destinations, like the military or skilled trades, are starving for new recruits.

It seems pretty clear to me. The success metric should be some combination of parent and student satisfaction.