It's also an expensive and time-consuming process. You're either burning a stack of money because you absolutely need that info, or a slightly smaller stack to cook the books in full view of people who understand statistics way more than you do.
Can you please elaborate on this? My impression was that judging teachers is actually fairly hard. See, for example, push-back on standardized testing.
The most useful metric I can imagine is where the students are in some number of years, but the obvious (to me) problems are
1. Takes years 2. Lots of confounding factors
The kpis that get pushback are indicators of whatever you want them to be. They’re just as indicative of poor government planning or shitty parents.
This feels like it puts a potential hard cap on quality growth by discouraging mixups or experimentation that might improve education, but wouldn’t please an old-guard for one reason or another, and discourages alternative class styles which the judge doesn’t approve of.
Both of those seem like potentially serious problems in education, given that its structure has with few exceptions been effectively stagnant over the last several hundred years. You therefore may be mistaking “evaluating the success at implementing the widely accepted method” for an “evaluation of quality”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
If you mean the university and college levels, they have interesting differences from the 18th century, but are recognizably similar in regards to basically everything besides cost and curriculum differences we'd expect due to changes in societal needs, technical advancements, and changing interests.
If we’re going back farther than that, then I’m really having a hard time seeing where the stagnation comes in—I don’t agree with that even past that point (gifted education alone is only just now starting to develop into something halfway useful, and that’s a very recent change in just one small part of primary and secondary education) but if we’re going farther back, then… what?
Letter grades are an 1897 invention and only at one college to start with: https://studysoup.com/blog/uncategorized/history-of-the-lett...
Your line of thinking makes sense, and your questions were more or less answered last century. I think this would be a useful conversation to have with a GPT...
> You therefore may be mistaking “evaluating the success at implementing the widely accepted method” for an “evaluation of quality”.
because that conjecture alone is an entire topic of study in several disciplines.
Yep, this is what works. All the attempts to turn it into a simple spreadsheet based on something you can easily measure from an office across the state have been so flawed they’re very nearly useless, if not actively harmful. We keep doing it anyway because the people making those calls either don’t understand the field or do, but don’t care because they want to implement bad ideas for political reasons (trend-following to avoid criticism is huge, for one thing)
A simple method would be to identify interesting problems from recent PRs and ask them to walk you through their approach to discovery and solution. It's a problem they should be familiar with, but in a new shape and with different labels. Let's see what they come up with.
Your point about people who don't understand the process using these measures because it suits their purposes is also relevant. Productivity measures can be a political tool.