Highly educated but lacking in useful skills--me?

I see little evidence of a conscious political effort to lump those who are highly educated but lacking in useful skills together with those who are highly educated and actually useful skills, even if that's the way of society in general and the academy in particular.

However, it's true that teachers are rarely trained to teach effectively. Moreover, I know from personal experience that when teaching at the college level at least, we're not pushed to find ways of improving learning outcomes. Instead, we're rewarded on the basis of student evaluations (which basically comes down to how much the students like us), and research, which may or may not have much classroom relevance.

(I posted this as a response to Arnold Kling's post but it's not showing up yet, and I wanted to save the links to the two articles mentioned.)