Age, written in water

John Hattie suggests that a teacher with an ATAR of 57 will have 40-50% of their students brighter than them.  This is beyond ridiculous.  Leaving aside the obvious bias of a government that wants to defy the market by getting better teachers without paying more for them and an educational system that wants to blame its failures on bad students rather than rotten teaching, ATARs are not a simple measure of intelligence, whatever that is.  Your ATAR depends, among other things, on your class, your motivation, your school, your family, and your luck on the day, and any suggestion that it’s an unchangeable lifetime sentence is both stupid and cruel.