In journalism, especially, we tend to deal with large, complex systems by finding especially interesting people and story lines to focus on.

I think serious research tends to be associated with higher academic quality, more prestige, more resources, and even, heaven help us, better teaching, to a greater extent than you might think. Folks who don't have an active intellectual life become, though the long years of just teaching, less intellectually alive and exciting.

Profound question is how do you measure the non-skills component of what goes on in schools: values, curiosity, critical thinking, and so on. That's very tough. Maybe everything worthwhile can't be measured.