I hope it’s not bad taste to post a story about good versus bad teachers on a day when Santa Clara laid off 1000 teachers.

Brooks:

We’ve spent years working on ways to restructure schools, but what matters most is the relationship between one student and one teacher. You ask a kid who has graduated from high school to list the teachers who mattered in his life, and he will reel off names. You ask a kid who dropped out, and he will not even understand the question. Relationships like that are beyond his experience.

On a day when my work colleagues and I were discussing appropriate metrics to track, I wonder…

….if you asked all school kids to list the teachers who mattered, what would be the coorelation between that list and the teachers that do well/badly on more traditional metrics (test scores)?