You already said you think teachers are overpaid and underworked and your goal is to make things harder for them.

Why should they want to work under a system like that?

What independent agency would you want devising metrics to figure out how good you are at your job while knowing nothing about the specific challenges you deal with?

I believe teachers currently are comped at above-market rates. I would bring them down to market rates. They would work under that system for the same reason most other professionals work at market rates - it's the best they can get.

The independent agency which currently devises metrics to figure out how good I do my job is the stock market. My bonus = % of profits.

When I was a professor, I favored (and suggested to the department) that some higher authority should devise midterm and final exams. It would a) allow us to measure teacher performance, as opposed to student opinion [1] and b) allow comparison of student performance across classes.

[1] To get good student evaluations, all you need is easy tests + jokes + good looks.

You've got market and non-market all mixed up.

Public education isn't a market good, it's a public good. Toilet paper and oatmeal are market goods.

The labor market for teaching is in fact a free market. Any given municipality can pay whatever they want to pay, and get the talent they're paying for accordingly. The fact that teachers are getting laid off in something like 80% of municipalities the last few years means you don't even have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Agree on the statements about professors. All the same. If you were working on something more qualitative as part of a team, and not a lone trader, we both know there's no quantitative way to assess your work. Lines of code is a joke and other metrics invariably bring in subjective measures.

EDIT to add: If you're pro-free market, shouldn't it be up to municipalities to choose which teachers they want to keep or fire as they see fit, without some bureaucrat telling them that according to some BS test scores they have to do such and such?

Education is not a public good since it's both rivalrous and excludible. That makes it a private good. The fact that a private good is provisioned by the government does not make it a public good.

Also, the labor market for most govt employees is not remotely a free market. Unions keep out the competition, essentially getting no-bid contracts to supply labor. They play politics to elect politicians who will give them what they want - in many cities the teachers unions essentially control the political system. You might as well call Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq a "free market". It's a "free market", closed to new entrants, with no negotiation between the buy and sell side, but with the buy and sell side colluding to rip off the public.

In any case, just because it's tough to quantitatively measure some development does not mean it's tough to measure teacher performance. Students either know the material at the end of the term or they don't, simple as that.

All the whining about how it's impossible is really just an attempt by teachers unions to avoid accountability. I'm sure Halliburton would love to avoid accountability for their performance in Iraq and elsewhere too, doesn't mean we should take them seriously.

So, by your logic, roads and sewage are private goods? Basically everything except the military? Consistent with a libertarian.

In almost no city does the teacher's union essentially control the political system. The police union is always, always more powerful, for one. They're just more politically engaged, people who are driven by power. Several private unions will be more powerful. And that's leaving out every power broker that isn't a union (representing most of the power).

"All that whining about how impossible it is to measure programmer productivity is just an attempt by developers to avoid accountability." You might consider that you don't know a single thing about teaching in a non-college or lower-class environment. No offense. I don't claim to, either. But I'll at least listen to what every teacher I've ever met says about the matter.

Programmers may routinely be judged by peers, but the entire team is then judged by results. A team that can't ship gets the axe or goes under. The closest counter-examples to this I can think of, doing government contracts, have also been some of the worst software shops that I've encountered.

So what's the analogous mechanism going to be? Are you ok closing entire schools if they have lower than average test scores in their class (whatever this means)? Otherwise, how do prevent the whole system from devolving into politics and cronyism?

This presupposes that a standardized test can test anything of value. I've spent the majority of my last 16 years in school, since the 3rd grade or so I've had no problems evaluating the competence of my teachers, and I didn't need a test to do so.

But how do you know your evaluation is accurate? A colleague of mine was fond of saying that asking your average student what she thought of her teacher was like asking your average seven year old what she thought of her flu shot.

Even if you are exceptional in this regard, the average person will not do well. And I have read a lot of reviews in my life from college students.

Until you know the subjects well, you are only evaluating whether or not you liked it.