SATs tests and giant nails
25 JUL 2008 – In Britain just now a huge political row is in progress about Britain's SATs tests. They were a shambles, with delays, ludicrous errors and inconsistencies, and all kinds of stories flying around of students, and worse, "cocktail waitresses", being drafted in at the last minute to do the marking. ETS is (see here) "recognised worldwide for the high quality of its products". Not in Britain. In Britain ETS is a laughing stock. And whatever chances Britain's education minister Ed Balls had of succeeding Gordon Brown as leader of whatever is about to remain of the Labour Party have likewise disappeared.

I remember when the idea of competitive tendering by businesses for government contracts was a brand new wheeze of free marketeering think tankers, back in the days of Margaret Thatcher. Competition would, said the think tankers, drive down prices. And I'm sure that it often did. But this ETS SATs fiasco illustrates the downside of such arrangements. Maybe ETS were the most "competitive" bidders. But any way you slice it, this was still a government decision, no different in principle from a decision to pay the wages of some newly hired civil servants. Would an individual spending his own money have been so careless with £156 million? Would a company that made a decision like this suffer as little as governments suffer when they cock things up? I have even encountered the suggestion that the EU compelled the government to accept the lowest bid, although my understanding of British officialdom is that it often uses the EU as an excuse for decisions that are actually its own.
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