In 2013, a team of experts funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wrapped up a three year, $45 million project to identify Measures of Effective Teaching (MET)--an effort to determine whether it's possible to put numbers on something as complex as teaching. After reviewing 20,000 classroom videos, crunching data from thousands of student surveys, and parsing value-added achievement results for 3,000 teachers in seven districts, they concluded it was, in fact, possible to accurately evaluate effective teaching--largely by triangulating data from student learning gains, student surveys, and to a lesser extent, classroom observations (which, they cautioned, should be conducted on multiple occasions by multiple experts or by expertly trained observers). Like any major report, the study had its critics. Amid the debate, though, few paused to ask whether better evaluations actually yielded improvement in teacher performance. Not long after the report's release, Bill Gates's company, Microsoft, announced it was moving away from rating and ranking employees and toward giving employees real-time feedback and coaching. This rethinking of performance management by corporations seems to have come from connecting the dots found in, of all places, education research.