> If teachers were estimated on mean test scores, we could rank them the same way we often rank salespeople.
Good sales people create value by bringing in money, and sales are measured in money. Good teachers create value by teaching well, and mean test scores don't measure teaching well. That might be slightly simplistic, but that's the big picture idea.
> And with sales, you need to determine whether your attribution/commission model is an accurate measure of salesperson compensation to company profits
I'm not arguing that sales people are always fairly compensated, only that there is less complexity in doing so and the epistemological issues are more straightforward.
> So test every quarter and evaluate on that basis.
In sales, measuring is free, whereas testing is more like growing carrots... If you keep pulling up your carrots to check how big they are, then at the end of the summer you're not going to have any carrots.
> explain why teaching is fundamentally different than every other profession
So near as I can tell, we can't detect the dragon by looking since he's invisible. We can't use a heat meter to detect him with since the fire lives in his (perfect insulator) stomach. We can't put dust on the floor to look for fingerprints since he floats.
Would the world be any different if the dragon didn't exist?
Similarly, if "teaching well" didn't exist, how would the world be different? What testable predictions (if any) does your set of ideas make?
In sales, measuring is free, whereas testing is more like growing carrots... If you keep pulling up your carrots to check how big they are, then at the end of the summer you're not going to have any carrots.
Giving quarterly exams will somehow destroy all learning?
This goes against pretty much all the principles of spaced repetition. I take a Hindi test every day and it sure seems to help me.
I mean if you're willing to accept that the best teachers are the ones that improve standardized tests the most then the research on VAM shows that good and bad teachers exist, it's just not able to reliably differentiate between them in a reasonable amount of time.
A more straightforward 'proof' would just be looking at all students who take a class on something random like mycology and then seeing what percentage have had some level of engagement with that subject five or ten years later.
Good sales people create value by bringing in money, and sales are measured in money. Good teachers create value by teaching well, and mean test scores don't measure teaching well. That might be slightly simplistic, but that's the big picture idea.
> And with sales, you need to determine whether your attribution/commission model is an accurate measure of salesperson compensation to company profits
I'm not arguing that sales people are always fairly compensated, only that there is less complexity in doing so and the epistemological issues are more straightforward.
> So test every quarter and evaluate on that basis.
In sales, measuring is free, whereas testing is more like growing carrots... If you keep pulling up your carrots to check how big they are, then at the end of the summer you're not going to have any carrots.
> explain why teaching is fundamentally different than every other profession
I never said or implied this.