Can more schooling actually be a bad thing in some cases?

According to a new report issued by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, the answer may be yes--at least as relates to teacher pay. The basis for the argument is two-fold. First, research evidence reveals that teachers who have gotten their masters degrees in education demonstrate no enhanced ability to improve student learning as compared to teachers who only have a bachelors degree. Second, because teacher pay is typically tied to advanced degree completion, the amount of money US schools spend on pay raises for teachers who have gotten their masters is substantial: about $8 billion annually. As a result, schools are pouring huge sums of money down the equivalent of a toilet--if the goal is producing positive results for children.

Let's look at each of those propositions a little bit closer. The conclusion that a teacher's advanced degrees have little impact on student achievement has been reached by numerous researchers--at least when the advanced degrees in question are in the field of education (this report famously concludes, "consistent with prior findings, there is no evidence that a master's degree raises teacher effectiveness."). It does turn out that advanced degrees in specific content areas like science and math do have positive impacts on student learning in those subjects--but alas the vast majority of teachers who have masters have them in education, not in science or math.

Does all of that make sense? Well, if you've ever participated in or read about run-of-the-mill teacher training programs at most schools of education in the United States, you'll agree with the conclusion. Put simply, apart from elite institutions that offer highly selective and rigorous teacher training programs, schools of education just don't do much to turn teacher candidates into good teachers. I took a couple of teacher prep classes at Missouri Baptist University in order to obtain an emergency credential in St. Louis when I taught there in 2007-2008--and the classes actually hurt my ability to help students learn since they needlessly wasted hours of my time on fluffy journals, pointless online assignments, and so on.

So if masters degrees in education do so little for our children, why should adults who have obtained them earn more than those who haven't (sometimes as much as $10,000 per year more, in places such as Washington State)? I can't think of a good reason. Ordinarily, individuals with masters degrees earn more than their counterparts in the same field because their additional training--in finance and accounting, engineering, etc.--represents a skill or knowledge set that will improve their productivity and effectiveness as an employee. In a typical profession, if an employee has a masters degree but nonetheless fails to add value for the company, that employee will stand to get fired or demoted. In the absence of the ability to fire and remove teachers at will (or, at least those who are on tenure), the same kind of controls don't exist in education. When combined with the faulty assumption that a master's degree actually confers beneficial skills for teachers in the first place, the result is a lot of wasted money.

At the end of the day, to really understand the question, all we need to do is ask ourselves this question: is there a better use of $8 billion for American school children than randomly giving that money out to some teachers but not others, without any regard to how good they are at their job? Anyone can come up with answers to that question--there are a lot of good ways to spend $8 billion for kids. The challenge is convincing law makers and teachers unions to agree to let such a change happen.