>As far as I can see, nobody has come up with a magical metric for rating teachers. If anything, most of the metrics out there are outright counterproductive --

>As far as I can see, nobody has come up with a magical metric for rating teachers. If anything, most of the metrics out there are outright counterproductive -- and you can see it in schools across America, where teachers are being constantly urged to inflate grades for their 'customers', overlook plagiarism, ignore the most talented students in favor of the least talented ones, and help drive down the quality of education for the next generation. You can do things to improve the quality of data - use multiple metrics, don't announce them up front and certainly don't standardize - so that optimizing for a specific test doesn't justify the cost, also change testing as needed/with dynamic feedback and use the results to get insight in to the problem. Computers can only help with this sort of thing. Ultimately it's about defining the objective of education, what environment students are supposed to be prepared by it and exposing them to that environment, just like you want to test the system in production as soon as you can, benchmarks are always synthetic and can't replace "real world" testing. Data won't capture everything and could in fact be 100% misleading - that's the nature of imperfect knowledge - but if used correctly it can help provide insight in to situation. Just don't conflate benchmarks and reality, use it as a tool for improved feedback/analysis. Of course this approach is absolutely incompatible with bureaucratic systems. Heck the entire education system is based around optimizing for arbitrary/artificial evaluation metrics (all that crap about higher education and signaling, that starts with primary education). As for favoring least talented over most talented, that's just different objectives, I don't think it changes with more quantifiable information about students performance, do you want to raise the bottom at the expense of the top.