I saw the movie Food, Inc, yesterday, which I may blog more about later (short synopsis: skip the movie, read the books). One area it discussed is regulation -- the feds tightly regulate the process of food production in certain bizarre ways (no slaughtering chickens for food outside) rather than regulating the outcomes (small farms that slaughter birds often have far fewer contaminants than the birds that come out of the massive slaughterhouses). It occurred to me that this is exactly part of the problem in education, too. In education, the process is tightly regulated in the public schools -- teachers must be certified, only certain books are allowed to be purchased, states have numerous highly specific standards that must be taught. Before NCLB, the outcome really wasn't measured at all, and nothing was tied to it. So, I must grudgingly at least concede to NCLB that, if we must regulate, it at least regulates outcomes (not as I'd have them do it, to be sure) rather than process.

So, why does the government regulate process rather than outcome? I think to a large degree this happens in many industries because regulating process benefits incumbents in industries. It entrenches those who are already in position -- the big meat packers, the teachers' unions, Monsanto, large textbook publishers. By regulating process rather than outcome, the process can be made very difficult and expensive, so that newcomers cannot break in. If you regulate outcome instead, then newcomers can come along and break down the huge leads the entrenched players have with advances in technology or simply by being better at what they do.

Of course, this overlooks the option of not regulating at all, which is an option that should be more explored in a lot of industries.

In sum, I think we'd be a lot better off if the government made their goal regulating outcome rather than process. This approach won't work everywhere -- finance and health care would be tough to regulate fully by outcome rather than process, for example, but food and education seem like natural areas to focus on outcome rather than process. (I'm not holding my breath -- politicians can't help their funders as much if they meddle less in process.)

More on food later, perhaps... It's been a little over a year since I read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, and my changes in diet have had quite a significant effect.