My God! How can you advocate unbiased, quantifiable measures of teacher performance! Teachers have magical powers that can't be measured by numbers! Teachers aren't like people in other jobs who can be fired based on their performance! And tests are a horrible way to measure learning! Teachers never use tests themselves! Tests are never used to assign advanced/remedial classes, nor to enter college, and certainly not to get Advanced Placement credits! And, certainly, by God, hide this measure from the parents! You might make them think that something can be done to improve their child's education!!!

The cleanest languages I've used are C, Java, and OCaml. By "clean", I mean the language has a few concepts that can be completely memorized, which results in less "gotchas" and manual reading. For these languages, you'll see small manuals (e.g., K&R's book for C) which cover the complete language and then lots of pages devoted to the libraries that come with the language. I'd definitely recommend Java (or C, or OCaml) over C# for this reason. C# seems to have combined every feature of C++, Java, and VBA into a single language. It is very complex and has a ton of concepts, for which I could never memorize the whole language. I have a feeling that most programmers will use the subset of C# that is closest to the language they understand, whether it is C++, Java or VBA. You might as well learn Java's style of programming, and then, if needed, switch to C# using its Java-like features.