Articles: The Paradox of Merit Pay

Articles: The Paradox of Merit Pay: "The ideological premise of education departments is that knowledge, per se, is not a worthy goal of education; instead, these departments focus on process skills, however dubious. Therefore, they could hardly disseminate knowledge themselves and then follow up such lessons with objective and rigorous assessments. That would simply be hypocritical. Instead, ed school is mostly constructivist sloganeering (students "make meaning," teachers are just "guides," etc.), with the simple requirement that students repeat the slogans. Group work and cooperative learning are championed as the enlightened teaching methods. This accounts for the inflated GPAs which Briggs documents in his research.
This type of teacher preparation can never be rigorous. Furthermore, students willing to embrace and repeat this kind of sloganeering are a self-selecting group who place less value on academic rigor and more on ideological conformity. This is the very demographic group which will eventually repopulate the current crop of education professors, making the possibility of change even more unlikely."

Excellent diagnosis of the problem.