Graduation rate strikes me as a dangerous metric because it could easily be maximized by lowering the bar. We want to graduate as many students as possible but we should not compromise quality to do so. It seems to me we need metrics on both.

I do admit to not knowing what I am talking about so maybe there is no danger in using the graduation rate metric.

Well the best metric is going to be something like annual pre-tax income a decade after graduation but that will never happen so we'll just need to figure out some kind of composite metric that avoids perverse incentives.

edit: This is not an entirely serious suggestion. See later comment below.

Should income really be the final metric? What about less tangible (measurable?) factors like happiness? If we program all of our students to maximize income do we really make the world a better place?

It's not a metric for the students though, it's for the school. If you average it among all students, you get a reasonable metric for the how the school is doing. Of course, this would likely fail if you applied it to arts schools...

Anyway, it wasn't a completely serious suggestion. It's got some problems. Happiness is a good thing to measure, but you'd want to still do some long term tracking of other metrics. Incarceration rates, income, college graduation rates, higher degrees and certifications, etc.

edit: I make the comment about arts schools having received a degree in film and taken a haphazard path into startups and programming that ultimately worked out pretty well. I absolutely encourage people to go to school for the arts if that's what you want to be doing.

> What about less tangible (measurable?) factors like happiness?

A primary goal of school is making kids smarter and ultimately a functioning adult. Including being employable.

I don't think "happiness" is the job of an educator. The parents, absolutely. The local government? Maybe.

But if "good citizen" is a desired goal, we might be able to measure that. With surveys of alumni about current events, employment rates, financial principles, etc. To measure whether well-equipped, life-long learners are produced.

But I'd rather schools stay out of holistic goals better reserved for families.

Ignoring all that the timeline for that is so long it's not really useful for evaluating any changes because it'll be 10+ years before you have any new data, depending on where the change happens. On top of that it's so broad that it can only really measure the whole system from elementary up through college/trade-schools so even once you get data you can only really evaluate the system as a whole.

Graduation rates and college acceptance were tinkered with in New York to dismal results. Educational administrators were perversely incentivized, and it has showed up in atrociously high failure of local students to test out of remedial courses in public colleges.

Just because the test mean drops does not mean the test is flawed. The educational inputs could simply have worsened, which is exactly what a reliable indicator should show.

Do you have a metric that doesn't require waiting until students are leaving high school to return results? Some of these scores are for primary school students. It's not very useful to their teachers to be told 5-10 years after they teach a student that the improvements in instruction they attempted had or failed to have an effect.

Can you provide a reference to those countries with the best education systems?

Finland has just one, an exit exam at the end of high school, like a mandatory SAT.