In 1987, U.S. News & World Report began ranking American law schools. Before the rankings, law schools did not all try to be the same thing. Some were tuned to academic legal research and others to the corporate world, while still others built their identity around supporting the local community or serving underrepresented populations. Choosing a school meant reading about its mission, talking to people, and visiting, and as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen puts it, the choice often triggered “a certain degree of soul-searching” in prospective students about what they wanted from a legal education.

Sociologists Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder studied what happened next in Engines of Anxiety (2016). Once the rankings arrived, they came to dominate how most students chose a school, and public perception of law schools reoriented around them almost immediately. Schools that kept pursuing a distinctive mission, such as serving local underserved communities, dropped in the rankings and then saw donations and student interest fall. Most schools, Espeland and Sauder report, eventually abandoned their original missions and reorganized admissions and teaching around the factors the ranking counted, chiefly the GPA and LSAT scores of incoming students and the employment rate of graduates.

The earlier Biesta pieces on this site would call this a problem of purpose. Research-Based Is Not a Purpose looked at how “what works” questions crowd out “what for” questions, and What Is School For? looked at how to lead conversations that bring purpose back to the table. Both explain what goes wrong when measurement replaces purpose. Neither explains why the people inside an institution go along with it, or why so many of them come to care about the number sincerely rather than grudgingly.

Nguyen has a name for this: value capture. In this piece, I will 1) lay out what Nguyen means by value capture, 2) explain why he thinks we are so vulnerable to it, 3) describe what he thinks it costs, and 4) apply it at three levels of a school system. Nguyen is not simply one more critic of measurement. He fills in a mechanism that the Biesta pieces assumed but never described.

What is value capture?

Nguyen develops the idea in a 2024 article in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy and at book length in The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (2026). In the article, value capture happens when three things line up: 1) a person or group holds values that are rich, subtle, or still taking shape, 2) they are immersed in a larger context, often an institution, that offers an explicit version of those values that is usually simplified, standardized, or quantified, and 3) that explicit version, unmodified, comes to dominate their practical reasoning. He also offers a shorter version: value capture is when a person or group “adopts an externally sourced value as their own, without adapting it to their particular context.”

His examples are deliberately ordinary: step counts on a fitness tracker, likes and retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of schools, and grade point averages. Two of those come straight out of education, which says something about where this problem tends to show up.

The law school case also shows what value capture is not. Nguyen points out that the administrators and the students were in different positions. Administrators were forced to chase the ranking even if their own values never changed, which Nguyen says could be understood as a case of perverse incentives. Most of us know this pattern as Goodhart’s law, usually summarized as “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The teacher who drills test items and the school that reclassifies students to improve a rate both know, at some level, that the number and the goal have come apart. The students were different. Some were responding to employers who cared about rank, but a majority, according to Espeland and Sauder, seemed to care about the rankings directly. They were not gaming anything. The list had simply replaced the work of figuring out what they wanted.

Nguyen is also careful to say that using a metric is not the same as being captured by it. Someone who wears a step counter as a rough proxy for health, and who steps back every few months to ask whether it is actually helping, is still in charge of their own values. Capture begins when the proxy takes charge. One form he describes is especially relevant to schools, which he calls application capture. A person may still describe their values in the same rich terms they always have, but when it comes time to judge whether they are succeeding, they reach for the metric. An academic who says they care about truth and understanding, but who judges each article by its citation count, has been captured at the point of application.

This distinction matters in schools because most critiques of educational metrics stop at Goodhart. They argue that data can be gamed and that we should design measures that resist manipulation. Those are fair points, but they assume that everyone involved still knows what they actually value. Nguyen’s argument is harder to sit with, because it suggests that over time the measure can quietly become the value.

Why are we so easy to capture?

Nguyen’s answer is that clear, quantified values have a competitive advantage over rich, subtle ones in two places: our private reasoning and our public justification.

In private reasoning, a number is easier to act on. “Become a better writer” is hard to plan around, hard to track, and hard to know when you have done. “Raise my essay scores” is none of those things. Nguyen, whose main field is the philosophy of games, adds that metrics offer something like the pleasure of a game. In games, we know exactly what we are supposed to be doing and exactly how well we did, and internalizing a metric brings a bit of that clarity into the rest of life. Every day the clear version offers a next step and a visible sign of progress, while the rich version offers mostly uncertainty.

In public justification, the advantage is even stronger. Nguyen draws heavily on the historian Theodore Porter here. In Trust in Numbers (1995), Porter argues that qualitative knowledge is nuanced and sensitive to context but hard to manage at scale and hard to pass between people who do not share background knowledge. Quantification strips out that nuance and creates a portable package of information that can travel across contexts without anyone needing to interpret it. A number can move from a classroom to a principal’s office to a board meeting to a state report without losing its apparent meaning, while a teacher’s description of what a student has learned cannot. Porter’s own summary is hard to improve on: “Quantification is a way of making decisions without seeming to decide.”

Nguyen adds a psychological piece. People tend to trust information that is easy to process, a well-documented effect called cognitive fluency, and numbers are about as familiar as information gets. Quantified values also come with what he calls engineered communicability. Once a group shares a metric, explaining yourself becomes easy, because everyone already speaks the language. As such, a quantified value does not only win because it is convenient. It also wins because it looks more trustworthy than the judgment it replaced.

What does it cost?

Nguyen names two main threats, and both have direct parallels in schools.

The first is that the goal of the activity changes. His example is Twitter, where the richer goals of communication, such as understanding each other and working toward the truth together, risk being replaced by the thinner goals of collecting likes and going viral. The students choosing law schools are a clear case. The goal of finding the right legal education gave way to the goal of getting into the highest-ranked school that would take them.

The second threat is subtler. Nguyen argues that working out exactly what we value, and adjusting that articulation as we learn from experience, is a core process of self-governance. His main argument for why this matters is practical rather than abstract. People and small communities know their own circumstances far better than any distant institution does, so values they tailor themselves tend to fit their lives better.

Value capture cuts off that tailoring. Instead of adjusting our values in light of our own experience, we accept a version formulated for someone else’s needs, usually an institution that wants measures it can count reliably and aggregate easily. Those measures were never designed to fit any particular person or place. In Nguyen’s words, “we buy our values off the rack.”

What does this look like in schools?

What Is School For? described purpose conversations at three levels: the micro level of the classroom, the meso level of the district or organization, and the macro level of the state and the wider system. Value capture shows up at all three, and the tools that supply simplified values are a bit different at each.

At the classroom level

Grades are Nguyen’s own extended example. He asks us to imagine a classroom that gave only written feedback, which could address clarity in one place and originality in another, and could be tailored to a nursing student differently than to a future lawyer. If the only goal were educating the student, he notes, there would be no need to rank every student on a single common scale. Drawing on historians Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt, he points out that standardized grading grew up to serve an organizational purpose rather than a teaching one. Grades made students easy to transfer between schools and easy for employers and admissions offices to sort. A GPA takes that one step further, compressing a whole education into a number that can be dropped into a spreadsheet and used as a cutoff.

The trouble is that students learn early which number follows them, and for many of them, protecting that number becomes what school is for. Learning platforms add a newer layer on top of grades. Progress bars, completion checkmarks, mastery percentages, and streak counters offer students and teachers a ready-made answer to “How am I doing?” None of these are bad tools on their own. The risk is application capture. A student may still say they want to understand the material, and a teacher may still say understanding is the goal, but when either of them checks whether things are going well, the class view full of green checkmarks is what answers.

At the district level

Nguyen notes that groups can be captured too, and his description will sound familiar to anyone who has sat through a planning meeting. Even when a group agrees that it cares most about something hard to pin down, like fostering curiosity, the day-to-day decisions end up driven by whatever clear metrics happen to be on hand. He also points out that GPAs can themselves be aggregated into a measure of a teacher’s or a whole district’s performance, which is how a classroom-level number turns into a district-level value.

In districts, the clear metrics usually arrive with the software. LMS reports, vendor dashboards, and professional learning systems supply completion rates, login counts, minutes of use, and seat hours. These numbers are easy to pull and easy to put in front of a board or a funder, which is exactly Porter’s point about portability. A district usually starts with a question like “Is this program helping our students?” or “Is this professional learning changing practice?” Those questions take judgment, conversation, and time. The dashboard offers an easier question that looks similar: “Are the numbers up?” When the board meeting is next week, the easier question tends to win, and after a few cycles a district may find that it judges programs by usage without anyone ever deciding that usage was the goal.

Nguyen suggests a different relationship. We often have to use institutional metrics, he says, but we can keep them “at emotional arm’s length,” using them in our reports and funding requests “only as the trade language of bureaucracies.” For a district, that might mean reporting the completion rate the funder asks for while keeping its own, richer account of what the program is for, and judging the program by that account.

At the state and vendor level

The largest-scale simplified values are the ones built to compare hundreds of districts at once: accountability ratings, school report cards, and the platform-wide definitions of “engagement” or “success” that vendors build into their products. These measures are useful precisely because they mean the same thing everywhere.

In his discussion of Porter, Nguyen uses an example that fits rural places well. Land in England was once measured in hides, where a hide was the amount of land needed to support a family. A hide in a fertile river valley was smaller than a hide in dry country, so the measure tracked something that mattered, but it took local knowledge to apply and could not be managed by a distant bureaucracy. As governance centralized, the hide gave way to the acre, which is easy to administer from anywhere and says nothing about whether the land can feed anyone.

Statewide and national education measures tend to work more like acres than hides. A small rural district may care about things a statewide rating or a national product was never designed to see, such as keeping young people connected to the community, preparing students for the work available in the region, or supporting families across long distances. When a district adopts the external measure as its definition of success, it is buying its values off the rack at the scale of an entire school system.

Is the answer fewer metrics?

It would be easy to read Nguyen as arguing against measurement altogether, but he says plainly that value capture is not always wrong. Like any form of outsourcing, it trades fine tuning for efficiency, and sometimes the trade is worth it. Some goals are best pursued collectively with a precise, shared target. His examples are reducing carbon emissions and increasing vaccination rates. It is much harder, he says, to see what we gain by pursuing a single shared specification of something like fitness, music, or family life.

His proposal is what he calls value federalism. In law, we want some laws set nationally, some at the state level, and some at the county or city level, because the benefits of sameness are worth the cost in some areas and not in others. Nguyen argues we should treat values the same way, keeping a variety of values at different scales. The problem is not that large-scale values exist. It is when we develop “an excess preference for the largest-scale values” and let them swamp the smaller-scale ones.

For schools, value federalism offers a better question than “Should we use data or not?” The question becomes which of our values should be held at the state level, which at the district level, and which at the level of a classroom or a single student. Some things probably should be measured the same way everywhere. Other things should be defined and defended locally, even when that makes them harder to report.

This is also where Nguyen’s debt to James C. Scott becomes clear. He cites Seeing Like a State directly, and he describes the institution’s view of the world in Scott’s terms: large institutions can only manage what they can see, and they can only see what has been made legible to them through standardization and quantification. Value capture is what happens when we adopt that institutional view and start evaluating ourselves in its terms.

How does this connect back to Biesta?

In Good Education in an Age of Measurement, Gert Biesta argues that education has drifted from measuring what we value to valuing what we measure. He traces that drift to questions of technical validity (are we measuring this accurately?) standing in for questions of normative validity (are we measuring what we actually care about?). Biesta describes the drift at the level of systems and policy. Nguyen describes it at the level of a person’s or a group’s practical reasoning. Read together, they give a fuller picture: Biesta explains what is lost, and Nguyen explains how people come to lose it without feeling any loss.

There is one more connection, and it is my own bridge rather than a claim either author makes. Biesta’s third domain of educational purpose, subjectification, is about students becoming people who can judge and act for themselves rather than simply fitting into existing orders. Nguyen’s account of value capture describes something close to the opposite. A student who has handed the question “What do I care about here?” over to a GPA has, in a small but real way, stopped doing the work that subjectification asks of them. If that reading holds, value capture is not only a measurement problem. It is a problem for one of the main things school is supposed to be for.

Where does that leave us?

None of this means that grades, dashboards, or accountability ratings should disappear. Nguyen is clear that some values belong at large scale, and that using a metric as a proxy we keep checking against our own values is different from letting it take charge. A district that deliberately reports a simplified measure while holding onto its own account of purpose is doing something different from a district that inherited one without noticing. The difference is whether anyone is still doing the work of deciding.

That raises a question this piece cannot answer on its own. If some values should be held at large scale and others kept local, someone has to decide which is which, and those decisions are rarely made by the teachers, students, and communities whose values are on the line. Nguyen is careful to say his argument is not specifically about capitalism, since a fully socialist bureaucracy could capture values just as well. Who makes those decisions, and whose interests they tend to serve, is where this thread goes next.

If you want to keep going with Biesta, What Is School For? Leading Conversations With Biesta lays out his three domains of purpose, and Research-Based Is Not a Purpose looks at his critique of “what works.”

If you have thoughts, questions, or ideas about this piece, reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and find more of my writing at bradylicht.com.