It is often assumed that education can be improved. But, what would improved education look like? To answer that, one must clearly identify the goals of formal education. This isn’t as easy as it seems. Obviously, academic goals, often specified by state “standards”, are learning objectives that the educational system seeks to have students learn. The methods employed by the system result in some percentage of students demonstrating goal achievement, usually within an academic year. An improvement in effectiveness would result in more students achieving the goals in the same time period. One could also improve by helping students achieve the goal with less effort, time, or cost. Those are improvements in efficiency for the academic goals.

School systems have several other goals, such as improving learning generally, or making students better citizens, etc. These non-academic goals are often not explicitly stated as the academic goals are.