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Conspicuously missing from the various weighting schemes they compare is one with 100% classroom observations. It's not that conspicuously absent as they don't

Conspicuously missing from the various weighting schemes they compare is one with 100% classroom observations. It's not that conspicuously absent as they don't use 100% weighting for anything. That said, they do attempt to maximize ability to predict state test scores, and in that optimization classroom observation plays the smallest role of the three metrics (2-9%). Given they appear to have to done the analysis across all weightings, I seriously doubt they'd hide this data. I do find it odd that teachers would rather be judged based on one or two people observing their classroom and ignoring actual student output, rather than raw numbers. As a developer I'd much rather be evaluated on some metric I could optimize for (I think some metric measuring feature value/bugs/fix rate/etc...), rather than just my manager watching me code/debug a couple of times per month.

streptomycin 14y ago
I do find it odd that teachers would rather be judged based on one or two people observing their classroom and ignoring actual student output, rather than raw numbers. As a developer I'd much rather be evaluated on some metric I could optimize for (I think some metric measuring feature value/bugs/fix rate/etc...), rather than just my manager watching me code/debug a couple of times per month. Okay, I really don't understand this mindset. You'd really prefer it is, say, 1/3 of your salary was determined by the number of lines of code you wrote? Or the number of bugs you closed? Or some equally inane metric that only loosely correlates with your actual performance and can be easily gamed? What am I missing?
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  You'd really prefer it is, say, 1/3 of your salary was determined by the number of lines of code you wrote? I was a quant trader for a while. A considerable chunk of my salary was determined by profit, hardly unreasonable. Measuring developers in other areas is difficult because of heterogeneous goals - last year I built a search engine, this year I'm statistically tracking user behavior. Hard to compare one to the other. Education does not suffer this problem - last year a teacher taught 30 kids to read. This year she taught 28 kids to read. The goal is always maximizing the fraction of kids who can read.
  - streptomycin 14y ago
    I don't think it's obvious that these teaching metrics correlate better with teaching ability than LOC would correlate with programming ability. I'd expect weak correlations in both cases. I'm just speculating at this point, though.

streptomycin 14y ago

I do find it odd that teachers would rather be judged based on one or two people observing their classroom and ignoring actual student output, rather than raw numbers. As a developer I'd much rather be evaluated on some metric I could optimize for (I think some metric measuring feature value/bugs/fix rate/etc...), rather than just my manager watching me code/debug a couple of times per month. Okay, I really don't understand this mindset. You'd really prefer it is, say, 1/3 of your salary was determined by the number of lines of code you wrote? Or the number of bugs you closed? Or some equally inane metric that only loosely correlates with your actual performance and can be easily gamed? What am I missing?

yummyfajitas 14y ago
You'd really prefer it is, say, 1/3 of your salary was determined by the number of lines of code you wrote? I was a quant trader for a while. A considerable chunk of my salary was determined by profit, hardly unreasonable. Measuring developers in other areas is difficult because of heterogeneous goals - last year I built a search engine, this year I'm statistically tracking user behavior. Hard to compare one to the other. Education does not suffer this problem - last year a teacher taught 30 kids to read. This year she taught 28 kids to read. The goal is always maximizing the fraction of kids who can read.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  I don't think it's obvious that these teaching metrics correlate better with teaching ability than LOC would correlate with programming ability. I'd expect weak correlations in both cases. I'm just speculating at this point, though.