The sad thing is that this is so very obvious, and yet such an intractable problem to solve. The entrenched systems at every level of society will fight you at every turn when you try to improve things.
Preventing the Collapse of Civilization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
See also (2): Monty Python’s bicycle repairman sketch.
They have been very clear and upfront about the goal. They want to "solve" racial discrepancies in graduation rates so they've taken the classes often failed and are removing them.
For a while now it feels like the left and the right are attempting to one-down each other on how stupid they can get. That proposal seems like an example of the left trying to out-stupid Trump and the alt-right. Don't worry I'm sure the right is working on things even dumber than this, and then those will have to be topped, and so on. In 2024 we will have Dr. Oz and Marjorie Taylor Greene running against Oprah Winfrey and Kamala Harris.
I'm not sure how this downward spiral ties into the administrative position over saturation problem, but I have the intuition that it does somehow. Maybe what we have are a whole ton of people who don't really know how to do things who vote. Voting is ultimately a hiring decision, so what we get is a voting process that hires a whole bunch of either administrators who themselves don't know how to do things or crackpots because people without practical knowledge can't spot a crackpot.
Since they got by without any practical skills, they don't value such things. Now, they want to eliminate them entirely from the educational system.
The managers are at war with the individual contributors, and they don't understand that someone has to actually do work, or the system will collapse.
> Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers.
In 1941.
a) Forsyth County, GA in 1987
b) Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton
Influence can propagate so easily through mass media, meaning that it is now possible to generate enough business interest just through "hyping" (it's difficult to achieve this when messages have limited reach) --- combined with the fact that it is often cheaper and less risky to "talk" than to actually "do", we end up with a culture where hyping is preferred whenever possible.
You just summarized the decline of Western civilization in one phrase.
This has happened almost everywhere and efforts to push back have proven extremely difficult. I personally place a lot of the blame on the educational system for overproducing administrative skill sets and underproducing practical skill sets. There is some role for those things of course but we have far too many people for the administrative roles we really need and far too few for many other professions. This combined with the tendency of people to recruit people like themselves has oversaturated the market with administrators looking for reasons to exist.
The rot is to the point that we have the spectacle of Elon Musk looking like superman. Why does he look like superman? Because he actually does things instead of having meetings to discuss the meeting schedule. He's just a reasonably competent engineer and business founder with huge resources who... does things... and this makes him look superhuman by comparison to the hordes of administrators that only discuss doing things and commission studies about hypothetically doing things.