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That's because the goals of teaching are bizarrely ill-defined. With drug laws, we have a concrete, measurable outcome we're looking at. Most attempts to actual
by chc 15y ago
That's because the goals of teaching are bizarrely ill-defined. With drug laws, we have a concrete, measurable outcome we're looking at. Most attempts to actually define a goal for teaching (e.g. with standardized tests) have been derided as measuring the wrong things and harming education in the process by forcing teachers to "teach to the test".
- freehunter 15y agoSpot-on. It's incredibly difficult to measure intelligence, and learning could be defined as the delta of intelligence on a particular subject. The best way I can think of would be real-world application of the knowledge (in the form of applied projects), but that gets to be too time consuming and expensive in a world where "education" is mandatory to the point of being a commodity.
- r00fus 15y agoExactly. Current efforts at educator performance are attempts to apply basic economics to a real-world complex multivariate issue - how does a given teacher affect the arc of a child's overall education, when decoupled from the child's home environment and overall societal trends? Accurately measuring this kind of impact would be more similar to modeling weather than say, worker performance. A more accurate model would be like lifetime patient medical outcomes (which we also are poor at measuring in detail)... if we could measure how good a doctor is by the healthfulness of their patients, then we have the basic model by which we can measure educators.