Joe Bennett on measuring teachers.

I liked this had to copy it and blog it. Good teaching, then, is easy to recognise. But it is hard to measure. Exam results are important, but they are not the whole of education. And if you judged a teacher solely by exam results, then they would teach solely to the exams. Which would squeeze out the good stuff, the real stuff, the stuff that just happens. And that's often the stuff that sings home like a well-fired arrow. What will happen, I suspect, is that the mandarins of education will try to do to teaching what they have already done to learning. With the NCEA, they reduced a subject like English to thousands of discrete bits of knowledge, or skills, that they could then assess one by one. But that's not how English works. The NCEA brings down the net but misses the butterfly. And it will be the same with teaching. They will spend vast sums of money coming up with boxes to be ticked, boxes called Key Performance Indicators or some similar consultant jargon, in a bid to define good teaching. And although any kid in the school will tell you instantly who the good teachers are, the Ministry of Education won't manage it. The simple butterfly of human truth will elude them.