Mis-measurement and Mis-leadership

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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.

6 thoughts on “Mis-measurement and Mis-leadership”

  1. I’m partial to the arrangement whereby parents/students pay the teachers directly and the teachers rent their classrooms from the school.

  2. Why did you decide to post your Medium essays on Hackernoon? That electric green header really strains my eyes.

    • Hackernoon is one of he most popular publications on medium, an when they offered to put me in front of their subscribers, I happily agreed.

  3. In terms of kids having some poor teachers, I assume they are learning one of life most important lessons which is you have live and work with people you don’t like and dealing with incompetence is an important skill in life. (TBH most of the teachers of my kids have been fairly good and I do have a special needs child. I saw how local private schools would probably make my children more snowflakes.)

    Anyway, I assume the cost of having really great teachers is too high for our society and the increase burden on young parents of paying more for teachers will decrease the number of children.

  4. What do you think is the best way to see that young children whose parents fail them are taken care of by others with “skin in the game”?

    I have a similar question about homeless and other individuals who are unable to take care of themselves well. Where do you see the incentives for the best results?

    thank you for your writings —

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