College Football, the Postal Service and Bush-era Education
By Dr. Eugene Maier |
College football, the postal service and education in the Bush era may seem like an odd trio, but they do have one thing in common: the creation of elaborate, technologically sophisticated mechanisms intended to overcome the foibles and inefficiencies of individual human judgment and effort. With a common result: tyrannical systems that aren't very successful, except in diminishing the human touch.
The Bowl Championship Series (BSC) poll is supposed to be a precise way of deciding who's the best in college football. Before the BCS, various polls of coaches, sportswriters and other pundits would offer their choices for who's number one, often with some disagreement. So the BCS standings were contrived to make a definitive and objective selection based on a variety of measurable factors. At the end of the season a game between the two teams at the top of the standings would determine the champion. A formula was developed to give teams a numerical ranking based on various polls and computer rankings, the strength of schedule—a number contrived from "the cumulative won/loss records of the team's opponents and the cumulative records of the teams' opponents' opponents"—losses, and something called quality win points.
If you follow football, you know that many think the BSC number-crunching doesn't work. The nation's best two teams didn't play for this year's championship (in the interests of full disclosure, I am an Oregon Duck fan). Most likely the formula will get tweaked again, but given the vagaries of athletic contests, it's unlikely any formula will be derived that gives better results than the judgment of "experts," no matter how arcanely these judgments are made. But as long as it's the BCS standings that count, whatever their shortcomings, that's what teams will compete against. Forget about the other team—let's not be satisfied with simply a win. Let's do what gets us the most points in the BCS standings, even if that means running up the score against some hapless opponent.
While football fans were debating the BCS ratings, residents of Columbia County, a rural Oregon county of some 40,000 residents, were wondering what was going on. The checks were in the mail but they weren't getting delivered, at least not to the intended recipient. That's why the county was sending out delinquent tax notices. It turns out the folk in Columbia County are accustomed to addressing mail intended for county offices simply to Columbia County Courthouse, without a street address, and the local post office had no problem delivering it down the street. As a matter of fact, the County Courthouse had no street address. And that appears to be the problem because now, you see, the mail doesn't get sorted locally—it gets sent to Portland to get sorted before it's sent back to be delivered down the street. Apparently the automatic sorter, fooled by the lack of a street address, routed a bunch of the mail intended for the courthouse to Colombia, our South American neighbor.
The problem is being addressed. The U.S. Postal Service office in Washington D.C. has been notified so it can take care of the software glitch that is whisking domestic mail around the world. And Columbia County has assigned the courthouse a street address for future mailings. Its residents will learn to address their mail so the mail-sorter in the metropolis can read it, and in so doing, a bit of the charm of small town living will disappear. It's hard to imagine what's gained—economically and otherwise—by sending the local mail away to be sorted. If human touch and interaction have any value, it's certainly a loss.
Continuing the trend toward large mechanistic systems, touted to be foolproof, is the recently unveiled Bush education act. In the interest of accountability, covered with a veneer of rhetoric about not leaving any child behind, the plan orders