I

If instituting fair grades leads to crying, sobbing and “soul-crushing” setbacks, I wish her luck should she ever be called on to dig out a ruptured appendix at 3 a.m. on her birthday.

Mr. Baker has written a fine article, so persuasive that I’ve cut it out of the paper and put it in my wallet.

I look forward to quoting it whenever I spar with partisans in the wild.

The roots of performance reviews stretch back to around the time of World War I. Factories were scaling rapidly, and businesses needed strategies for managing vast numbers of workers and deploying them in the most effective ways.

“There’s nothing I can do about what I’ve done in the past,” he says.