[blahedo]

> Teaching degrees in the United States ... consistently attract the dregs of the college applicant pool.

I have to take issue with this statement because it unfairly paints an entire discipline with a broad brush. First of all, I don't think it's true that the teaching programs are particularly scraping the barrel (I'd pin that on some other programs, like business and criminal justice), and if it's truly "consistent" I'd love to see a cite. My suspicion is that the average intellectual quality of ed majors is about in line with the average student in general.

Second, even if that subgroup average were lower than the middle of the general curve, your statement implicates all teachers as bad, and comments like this contribute to undermining the classroom authority of all of them. I have no problem with calling out incompetence where it may be found, and there most certainly are individual incompetent teachers out there---we've all had a few. But if we paint all teachers as the "dregs" of academia, we make the job harder for the many competent and the several outstanding teachers that are also out there.

[yummyfajitas]

I'd love to see a cite.

The common citation is this one: http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...

[blahedo]

Ok, now we're talking about grad school, rather than college in general. This is an entirely different thing than what you seemed to be talking about (and what I responded to). As a result, we're also talking more about aspiring administrators rather than people who mostly just want to educate---even outside the "Education - Administration" specialty, a prime reason to get an MEd or an EdD is to jump tracks over into an administrative post of some sort.

Even at that, let's be a little careful how much we generalise and where we sling mud. In the first column in that table, "Computer and Info Sciences" ranks well below one subcategory of "Education" and only two spots above another; in the third column, it's below five categories of Education and tied to four more.