How Value-Added Is Like Basketball

There's an article in the New Yorker about how hard it is to measure the impact (and financial worth) of professional athletes that brings up many of the same issues and challenges we've seen discussed when it comes to value added, AYP, and other measurement issues in education (New Yorker). In particular, there's a section about what it would take to fairly evaluate the performance of heart surgeons that reminds me of the joke that was going around a few years ago about if AYP was used to rate dentists. Remember?