Mississippi has the best demographic-adjusted NAEP (4th & 8th grade) scores now
The "Mississippi Miracle" started in 2012 when the Republican governor/legislature introduced phonics-based instruction and began to hold back ~10% of 3rd graders per year who fail a reading test
In contrast, Oregon, with the lowest demographic-adjusted scores, has a Board of Education that has indefinitely "paused" since 2020 the use of any standardized test as a graduation requirement
Caltech (score-oriented by reputation) still has a median score under 1560
About 1% of high school graduates attend a top-20 university (Ivies, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Duke, Johns Hopkins, UChicago, Cal, UCLA, Georgetown, whatever)
I often hear people say they increase their efficiency/impact by trading time for money, e.g. valuing their time at $35/hr and booking an Uber for $15 to save 30 minutes of walking as a result
But is this compatible with your marginal time value in most models of productivity?
Extreme example: suppose that you can only work productively for 6 hours a day, then your time is worth $0 afterward and you should just walk
I guess under other simple models, non-Uber examples like administrative tasks exhaust some kind of motivational resource ineffectively
Maybe a simple model involves an "energy level" that goes up at "rest"
Then "tasks" all have "utility" and "energy cost"
This justifies spending money specifically on tasks which exhaust energy inefficiently when that energy would have been better used otherwise