Moreover, contrary to the assumptions of the present system, it's impossible to select good teachers by formalized bureaucratic and credentialist procedures.
Full agreement
Their ability is simply not amenable to formal bureaucratic evaluation, certainly not in a way that would be immune to Goodhart's law.
We could at least use a metric that's resistant to gaming, or that would provide useful data even when gamed, like using formal tests regularly, and comparing the progress of the classes a particular teacher tought against the average.
I want to learn what's well-understood about education. I expect to launch myself into some endeavors in teaching the first few levels of epistemic and instrumental rationality - ie., critical thinking and problem solving. I'm a little suspicious, though, of the scattered educational texts that I've so far read. In particular, education seems like a field where it's easy to have motivated thoughts, and hard to gather good data.
With my background (Math and CS) I'm a little at sea in educational literature. Does anyone know of good, reductionist-grade or evidential-grade, introductory texts in education?