My latest Medium essay, called Mis-Leadership and Metrics. An excerpt:
Instead of holding teachers accountable to a centralized statistical office, I believe that teacher evaluation should be undertaken by peers, principals, and parents. Test scores can be unreliable indicators for many reasons. Parents can readily assess whether a teacher is working conscientiously and effectively.
I have only started reading Nassim Taleb’s latest book, Skin in the Game. But I gather that he would make the point that when it comes to children’s education, parents have real skin in the game. If I allow my child to try to learn from a bad teacher, I suffer from that. If a bureaucratic system fails to remove a bad teacher, the designer of the system does not suffer consequences.
And of course I mention Jerry Muller’s book.