News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom. Parent comment

Re:The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom by zaroth on Friday January 09, 2015 @02:36AM (#8861173)
I've found the best way to discern what kids are learning at school is to, you know, talk to them for a few minutes.

I think the idea of trying to stack rank teachers and schools works about as well as stack ranking engineers. It's garbage-in garbage-out. The entire premise is faulty.

"You can only improve what you can measure" works great on manufacturing lines and click-through-rates. Not so much, strike that, not at all on humans.

Edit: analog31, exactly that, you are spot on.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom by yummyfajitas on Friday January 09, 2015 @04:04AM (#8861376)
How do you scale "talk to them"? One person can't talk to everyone. Once you have two people talking, how do you know if person As 8 ranking is really bigger than person Bs 7?

Further, if we accept your nihilistic belief that measurement is impossible, how can we know if teaching matters at all? What other sectors of the world does science fail in?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom by TeMPOraL on Friday January 09, 2015 @07:16AM (#8861901)
It's not that you can't measure; it's that tests (of the type we currently use) are a really wrong tool for the job.

Also such big dependence on tests seems to me like the result of people trying to structure out trust from their relationship.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom by yummyfajitas on Friday January 09, 2015 @01:09PM (#8863412)
What I'm responding to: The entire premise [of testing] is faulty...Not so much [measure what you want to manage], strike that, not at all on humans.
[ Parent | on HN ]