Now that the Gates Foundation thinks they’ve figured out how to evaluate teachers (see A Beginning List Of The Best Posts On Gates’ Final MET “Effective Teaching” Report), Bill Gates apparently has decided to endorse merit pay based on those measures (I, at least, hadn’t heard him support it before, but maybe I just missed it).

Gates writes about “measurement systems”
being the key to solving the world’s problems in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Of course, there’s plenty of evidence showing that merit pay is harmful (see The Best Resources For Learning Why Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea), and it certainly hasn’t received a positive review at Microsoft.

Also, in that article, Gates says we need to measure “value being added by colleges.” Value-added — where have I heard that phrase before?