Managing by numbers is bad. I once had a boss look over the commit count to the source code repo to measure effectiveness. However, software bosses have anoth

Managing by numbers is bad. I once had a boss look over the commit count to the source code repo to measure effectiveness. However, software bosses have another avenue: they can just hire and fire based on how well they think people are performing. They don't need to set up spreadsheets or anything to "prove" who isn't doing their job. And the engineer who has been told to move on can move on, because there isn't just one employer in town, even outside of the top-5 cities. And the manager has a reason to care about properly evaluating his reports. This attempt to measure educational performance by numbers, for all that it is screwed up, has risen as a desperate attempt for the people paying the bills to feel like they have some kind of accountability into the system they are paying for.