Group projects and group grades are all the rage. Grade competition in the classroom is discouraged. Someone might get his feelings hurt, poor thing. Public education is the only institution where pay is based strictly on how long you went to college and how long you've been working rather than how you actually perform. The GAE, for example, fights any suggestion of merit pay or higher wages for specialized teaching fields, and it opposes teacher accountability standards.
All teachers are equal, they argue, and deserve equal pay increments.
The result is that good teachers are underpaid, mediocre teachers overpaid. Such a pay system would never exist in free enterprise and it should not exist in public education. Lost in all that hokum is any emphasis on the actual student performance. Sure, there are a lot of social problems in our society. But public education should never have taken on the burden of attempting to solve all those problems.