More weekends than not, Colin shares here on HN an interesting link about education policy. I see from Colin's own top level comment that this one is shared for

More weekends than not, Colin shares here on HN an interesting link about education policy. I see from Colin's own top level comment that this one is shared for methodological discussion. I'm still mulling over what I think about this link after reading it, but I'm not sure I can agree that the Gates Foundation research group is engaged in a "lie" about anything. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues. There is other research on the issue of teacher quality and value-added measures to assess teacher quality, http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality and I encourage Hacker News participants to dig through some of the other publications to figure out what the best available current data show. The other comments here suggest that the blog author of the submitted blog post is overstating his own case at least as much as he accuses the Gates Foundation supporters of overstating their case. If people who oppose the kind of teacher ratings proposed by the Gates Foundation really had courage of their convictions, they might try to let learners have full power to shop for teachers, on the grounds that teacher quality measures miss many dimensions of teacher performance that are important to individual learners. In fact, very few states even have as easy and time-proven a policy reform as statewide open enrollment (which my state has had for almost a generation now) http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h... and no state yet lets learners shop for schools on an equal per-capita funding basis whether the school is state-operated or not (as the Netherlands has for more than a century). Teachers will have plenty of deserved professional respect and regard from their clients if their clients have power to shop. But if policy proposals for learner power to shop are rejected, hand in hand with rejecting proposals for evaluating teachers for their effectiveness in publicly subsidized instruction, I wonder what the true agenda is. What assurance do we (we parents, we taxpayers, we members of the general public) have that all schools are staffed with the best available teachers unless someone is checking on how the teachers are doing their work?