Metrics are fine, they just shouldn't be fetishized, and we shouldn't allow them to make us fire good teachers. They also shouldn't dominate what's taught to the extent they do. Nation of multiple choice test-takers? That's what we want out of our school system?
If the students didn't perform, but her superiors liked her, why are you assuming the superiors know what they are talking about?
Again, how can I compare the opinions of heterogeneous superiors, and why do you believe the opinions are correct and objective metrics are wrong?
Opinions fail on many counts - comparability and objectivity being the most obvious. Why do you fetishize opinion, and assert it as being more accurate than objective metrics?
They also shouldn't dominate what's taught to the extent they do.
All standardized tests do is measure whether a school is meeting their goals. If standardized tests are preventing schools from ignoring their goals and teaching whatever they feel like (or perhaps nothing at all), why is that a bad thing?
Further, standardized tests don't really measure much, except for how well student can take tests and regurgitate information.
Client - parents Contractor - admin Sub - teacher
Now imagine that both the client and the sub contractor are influential in the final product (student ability). How do you isolate an incident like divorce from the overall performance measurement of the teacher?
...good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances..
How do you know they were good? Because they said so, and one of their cronies agreed?
This link is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem
I'll note that you want to scrap objective metrics because they have some problems, but you don't seem to realize "teachers' intuition" also has problems. One of the biggest is comparability - how I can compare the intuition of teacher A with the intuition of teacher B?
With standardized tests, the answer is simple arithmetic.