Let me first say that I completely agree with you that the best way to solve the problem I posed would be to let the free market handle it (I feel this would also improve the quality of curriculum and teaching as well; government bureaucrats have no idea what should and shouldn’t be taught in math courses!). Unfortunately, as you know, we libertarians often have viewpoints that differ greatly from those of mainstream America, and try as I might, I just can’t foresee a scenario where we actually have true school choice. I was envisioning the more likely scenario where we keep largely the same public school system and add in some form of teacher evaluation. I just wanted to point out that, in this case, we really need to be careful how we evaluate teachers, since it’s a highly non-trivial problem.

Excellent post. Agreed that employee performance is most *definitely* something that can be evaluated (if not always easily “measured”), and that it’s often quite relative and subjective. It comes down to doing the best you can with what you have, and sometimes as you point out, “what you have” is often far outside your control…

I understand why teachers might be opposed to standardized tests to measure their performance. The problem is that they’re also opposed to every other method to measure their performance…

Ryan,

Again, there’s a much simpler solution — school choice. If parents have the ability to choose where to send their kids, you create a market in education. When you create a market, there’s an incentive for schools to figure out how to attract better teachers and measure their performance.

I know people on “the left” tend to be very wary of the response that we should just let the market sort it out, but it works…