alt Hacker NewsYou do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.
> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers
…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence
What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.
So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.