New future teachers most likely to cheat in college

To pick up on the thread that Jarhead started here regarding the where education is heading...

But there is one way in which education is fundamentally different from every other college discipline: it’s the only one whose students will go on to work in a government monopoly industry. Not only is the hiring process of public school systems less focused on identifying candidates’ academic excellence, there is evidence that it is actively hostile to excellence (e.g., that principals are less likely to hire top-scoring candidates from elite colleges than candidates from less rarefied institutions). What’s more, compensation for public school teachers is generally a function of time served (over which teachers have no control) and degrees conferred (over which they do). This has created demand on the part of teachers for graduate degrees—not necessarily for the acquisition of advanced skills, but for the diplomas themselves, which amount to valuable cash prizes

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We’ve organized education in this country in a way that decouples skill and performance from compensation, and instead couples compensation to the mere trappings of higher learning (e.g., masters degrees). We’ve created a powerful financial incentive for existing and future teachers to cheat. Maybe not such a good idea.

Full CATO article can be found here.

This article is a response to another recent article in The Chronicles of Higher Education where a professional ghostwriter tell about his booming business of writing papers for college students with anecdotal evidence that Education majors are his biggest clients.