A set of powerful quantitative observations, once again, create something of a social Heisenberg Principle in which the scramble to make the grade utterly transforms the observational field. “Quantitative technologies work best,” Porter reminds us, “if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their own image.”3 It’s a fancy way of saying that the SAT has so reshaped education after its monochromatic image that what it observes is largely the effect of what it has itself conjured up.
Reminds me of illich’s critique of institutions that exist only to preserve themselves
