The syllabus is typically defined politically, which is anything but homegeneous. In fact, pretty much everything surrounding the teacher is defined by politics, which makes it a huge problem.
Until we're mature enough to get rid of the politics surrounding the teaching of even core subjects, like science, we're screwed.
And I don't blame the teachers one bit for walking away.
Without tenure, for have a factual enriching conversation with her students she would have been fired. She's going to retire soon, and is worried about teaching because "her generation" only went into it because they didn't fight to get what at the time were men's jobs. Today a 4.0 college grad with a biology degree would never teach 2nd grade.
Please look up the definition of homogeneous - being defined politically has nothing to do with it. All calc 1 classes are the same, and some politician demanding that pi=3 doesn't change this.
Additionally, the modern teacher has to deal with and put up with rather a lot of things that aren't directly related to their subject areas, but are politically determined.
FYI, denotatively, homogenous and homegeneous have different meanings. Connotatively, they are somewhat interchangeable. I suggest you look up the meaning of "thesaurus" and "pedantic". Or skip that and ask yourself, did you understand what I meant?
I do agree with you that people who dislike politics should not work for the government (which is, by it's very nature, political).
Large companies generally have very low standards for software quality and employee productivity, so they are hardly proof that the problem is easy.
Some obvious factors that make it hard to evaluate both developers and teachers:
- An important part of the output is in effects on the team - The true test of the output often comes years down the line - The work is done out of sight of the evaluators - There are many confounding historical factors - The profession is subtle and hard for outsiders to evaluate - Poor management often limits worker effectiveness
And in many ways, teachers have it worse. Teaching is much less like writing software than it is like management.
A) I see no evidence for either of these
B) If teachers are doing a worse job, shouldn't the new generation of developers be worse than their forebears?
C) We could argue both points all day. Both jobs are hard to measure. That's my point.
The cost of software has been going up while the output has not been improving? Um, what?
Maybe we should institute some standardized tests?
Big companies already do this. They typically have very rigid processes for evaluating consultants/outsourcers and pretty much just follow the numbers. For higher end work it's trickier, but for standard stuff (build X screens in Y CRUD app) it works well.
The only real difficulty in measuring the output of individual developers is heterogeneity. Last year I built a search engine, this year I'm building a realtime data framework (and other stuff). That's not a problem for teaching, since the output of teaching is homogeneous (and is defined by the syllabus).