The main issue is that no one seems to agree on what to measure. "Student performance" is too fuzzy. Does that mean "proficiency"? Well, that's straightforward. But then you have problems graduating students who never become proficient, and it points out just how unfair society is. No one likes that! No one has created a metric that gives all parties an artificial warm and fuzzy feeling for all parties, that is very true.

It was "commercially viable", but so were it's plethora of competitors. The clones took over the world (except for maybe education and the Mac's eventual niche markets).

Openly documented does not mean you were allowed to clone it. Compaq had to reverse engineer the PC BIOS using engineers who had never looked at the BIOS. These engineers wrote a spec that a separate set of engineers then had to implement. It was very costly and laborious and resulted in a landmark court victory for Compaq.

I don't know if that is true or not, but I haven't seen teachers themselves propose an objective criteria for measuring their performance.

Reality disagrees with you.

Yes, for financial and social reasons we would like to use the public schools. The tradeoff is a whole lot of teaching at home.

The work you do with your kid is impressive! Keep it up!

If that is the reality, then we should change the system to reflect the reality. If we are, in effect, babysitting the kids then let's do it right. These kids are all of our problems when they "graduate" or otherwise leave school with no skill except going to prison.

The main thing I see in Atlanta is a poor incentive system that assumed teachers would be more honest than the population at large, which obviously was a shitty assumption.

Yes, none of the numbers make any sense at all. That is, it's a perfect public education budget item.

At least the pediatrician is somewhat constrained by organizations which do (mostly) adhere to the scientific method. FDA drug trials, peer-reviewed articles, etc. But yeah, there is still a lot of guessing going on. To be fair, they can't really run a controlled experiment on an individual patient, so they have to do some guessing.

They didn't create an open platform - the platform was "opened" for them by Compaq, and IBM saw a threat. Microsoft, on the other hand, saw an opportunity and happily licensed their code to all comers.

Market share is not as important as "profit share". This is true for both device makers and App developers. Apple matters very much, with only 20% market share by unit but 89% by profit. On the app front, Apple paid out $10 billion to developers last year while Google paid out $7 billion.

So yes, they still are relevant.

I only started thinking about children once I had them :)

I'm just now looking into education matters, and I'm absolutely horrified at how unscientific it all is. "Best practices" in education are often just the fad philosophy of the day and educators rebel furiously against any attempt to objectively measure their performance. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm trying to do as much as I can locally.

Common Core seems to have some evidence-based philosophy behind it, but from what I can tell Everyday Math is a steaming pile of "theory" with a few smallish case-studies. From what I can tell, educators mostly hate Common Core because of the testing aspect - in other words, they don't like being objectively measured.

I made a typo? Sorry. Your number is accurate and mine was not.

I have no idea whether the negotiated a lower price from Apple or not, but I will point out that $1.3 billion divided by 650,000 students is almost $2500 per student... the cost of the device is almost in the noise here.

This is common in education. You rarely see any kind of pilot project or scientifically valid feasibility work. Education as a field is mostly a philosophy-based practice and is only now starting to dabble in evidence-based decision making.