Are We Paying Teachers For Credentials Or For Performance?

The education establishment doesn’t like it that the classroom value of a master’s degree is being questioned. Jesse Saffron looks at the data in this Carolina Journal piece.

But one reason the legislature felt comfortable eliminating the extra pay is the lack of empirical support for the claim that the additional diploma improves teaching. North Carolina’s nonpartisan Fiscal Research Office of the General Assembly has found that “multiple studies [indicate] that teachers with advanced degrees perform no better than teachers without advanced degrees.”

One such study, conducted by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, focused on North Carolina teachers. It concluded that the relationship between teachers with master’s degrees and student achievement is statistically insignificant.

Another study, produced by economists Eric Hanushek and Steve Rivkin, shows that “a master’s degree has no systematic relationship to teacher quality as measured by student outcomes.”

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank and general proponent of teacher unions, has criticized master’s degree curricula as “a ‘confusing patchwork’ lacking in rigor and often absent course work that a reasonable person might imagine fundamental.” The CAP report also said that in the 2007-08 school year, state and local governments spent almost $15 billion nationwide for the master’s pay increase, following years of expenditure increases “many times” higher than inflation.

Even Arne Duncan, the current U.S. secretary of education, favors ending the automatic pay increases for master’s degrees in education. “There is little evidence [that] teachers with master’s degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers — with the possible exception of teachers who earn master’s in math and science,” Duncan said during a 2010 speech at the American Enterprise Institute. And philanthropist Bill Gates, who has given billions of dollars for education reform, told a meeting of state education administrators that “restructuring pay systems is like kicking a beehive,” but tough decisions need to be made, and one of them is to eliminate extra pay for master’s degrees.

Why should North Carolina automatically give teachers a 10 percent salary increase when they obtain a credential that doesn’t translate into higher achievement?

It’s simple: we shouldn’t.