Back when I was living in the American Southwest, I knew a man who went into politics. He ran for the local school board, won the election, and gave up in disgust after one term. What turned him off was the decision-making process - he said the most important factor in all the decisions was not making sure the kids got a good education or that the teachers were happy, but that the schools would avoid lawsuits.

This struck me as strange for two reasons. One, he was a university professor, so he should have had some clue about how educational institutions are run. Two, school districts don't really need to fear lawsuits, do they? I mean, it's not like the local schools can be actually driven out of business by a lawsuit. The law requires them to exist and educate, so even the most hideously expensive lawsuit's costs will just get passed on to taxpayers one way or another. That's not the disaster it would be for a privately owned business that would have to pay with its own money. Besides, many lawsuits aren't aimed at wringing out money but at forcing schools to change some policy or another. However annoying that might be, it can't be much less annoying than preemptively changing the policy in advance of a potential lawsuit.

I finally was able to make sense of this after thinking about the theory that the main value of education is not learning but signaling that you were smart enough to get into a good school and hard-working enough to finish it.

Lawsuits don't really threaten schools' existence or ability to educate, but they do look embarrassing on the news. If the purpose of your school is to give its students the ability to say that they went to a good school, a string of lawsuits just will not do. Remember that this is America, where government-run schools don't have the status that religious or private ones do - only homeschooling, GED or dropping out are worse for your status than a public school education.

The school board was doing the logical thing in a world which values going to a good school more than it values what you learned there. Looking at the politics of education more broadly, we also see why progressives love education so much. After all, if education is mostly about signaling how smart, hard-working and classy you are, and progressivisim is all about signaling about how smart, good and classy you are, they are a natural match. No wonder educational institutions end up filled with and run by progressives.

Too bad I can't ask the former school board member what he thinks of this hypothesis - he died years ago.