my sister vs. Bill Gates

[quarrel]

My sister is a primary school teacher in rural Pennsylvania, so I asked her her opinion of Bill Gates’s latest experiments at improving education.

Quick summary: over the past dozen years, Gates has given $5 billion - more than half the total charity this cause has received throughout its existence - to scholarships and education grants. He built

Comments

[shaterri]

I simply find it implausible that teacher proficiency cannot - just cannot, at all - be evaluated in a sufficiently accurate, uniform, and objective manner that we know who deserves a pay raise and who needs more training or a career change.
I'm honestly not sure. As you say, the outliers are easy, but when it comes to folks in the middle, and especially relative comparisons between them, things get a lot fuzzier, in ways that have nothing to do with teaching specifically but just with the multidimensionality of skills in general. Baseball evaluation is sort of the classic example of this; if player A's slash line (Batting Average/On-base percentage/Slugging) is .268/.374/.502 and player B's is .326/.376/.493, which one is better? Does it matter if player A strikes out twice as often as player B? What about the difference in position, if B plays a position where offense is at a premium (say, shortstop) and A plays a position where offense is easily found (e.g., first base), should that matter? What if player B's 'batting average