North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

Same with high-school CS. You're not really going to learn a lot of specifics in high-school CS, and what specifics you learn are unlikely to be that important. What's important is to learn computational thinking. The tests, however (at least when I took the AP CS test) only tested trivialities, stuff like the syntax of a particular corner of the C++ STL, and the course was therefore set up mainly around that. We literally spent about a month on minutae of iostreams! In an introductory course where most of the students had never programmed before! I could hardly imagine a more stupid way to teach introductory CS, and can't imagine it could've been invented except via ease-of-testing brain damage.

We're discarding some of our most valuable data. In most schools, student evaluations of teachers aren't even administered, let alone analyzed and weighted in teacher assessment. Skeptical? See the research below. Properly-constructed surveys yield very accurate results; students are surprisingly honest in their responses, and students truly value a hard, fair teacher who actually teaches his students over an "easy A" teacher.

Take a look at Ronald Ferguson's work and the MET Project [1]. I can't find the original article, but this New York Times article [2] is a decent summary.

[1] http://www.metproject.org/downloads/met-framing-paper.pdf [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html

Her first year out of her probationary year was a Kindergarden teacher. She had a girl in her class who had telltale signs of EBD (Emotional/Behavioral Disorders), and spent the year trying to convince the girl's mother to seek the appropriate (free) care from the educational system. The mother refused to attend any meeting; my wife eventually drove to her house to find the girl living in a "crack den" (her words). The girl's mother refused to allow her to be tested for EBD, and the girl barely finished the year with passing marks.

Over the summer, the district noticed that my wife wanted to help kids...so, instead of putting her back in Kindergarden the next year, she was reassigned to a juvenile detention center/lockdown facility, where the kids didn't want to be helped. There were instances where they'd pull the kids out of her class, one by one, until it was just her and another student, before they come in to arrest the student for a crime, or, have a disgruntled student show up on my doorstep at midnight with a handgun in his waistband.

Teachers get shit on by society, coworkers, and parents. The good ones are worth their weight in gold. The poor ones need to be replaced with better ones -- the problem is that there's no true way to rank teachers and how they teach that isn't subject to tampering or isn't completely subjective based on inter-school politics.

There's not a good solution to the teaching problem...which is why I'm excited to look at what the technology/startup community comes out with over the next few years. Open Source SIS'es/Course Management/Educational Networking is something that can make the teacher's life easier, and provide pointes and guidance for parents who want to learn more, or students who want to self-learn/pace themselves faster or slower.

This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the entire issue in question, and then just blithely assuming you are correct.

In fact, the evidence which is staring us in the face indicates that you are not correct, and that we were far better off before we decided to let No Child Left Behind and a group of for-profit "education" companies co-opt our system and turn it into a giant standardized-test machine.

You want an alternative that works better? No problem. Go back to doing things the way we did them before January 2001. By the way, this would emphatically NOT mean that we had "no metric at all", of course...we had testing before 2001. We just didn't structure our entire system around constant standardized testing and force teachers to teach to those tests, that's all. We also had other metrics, such as observing how students do in college.