Against The “Master’s Bump”

A lot of issues related to teacher compensation are extremely controversial. But Marguerite Roza and Raegan Miller have a great brief out about one aspect that shouldn’t be, the nonsensical practice of paying teachers more for acquiring a master’s degree in education even though there’s no evidence that acquiring such a degree helps people teach better:

Decoupling salary from experience is a tall order, but forward progress on school reform requires school districts to revamp their spending habits somehow. One habit related to experienced-based salary is the practice of paying a teacher with a master’s degree more than an otherwise identical teacher with only a bachelor’s degree. The long-cherished “master’s bump” makes little sense from a strategic point of view.

On average, master’s degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement. Master’s degrees in math and science have been linked to improved student achievement in those subjects, but 90 percent of teachers’ master’s degrees are in education programs—a notoriously unfocused and process-dominated course of study. Because of the financial rewards associated with getting this degree, the education master’s experienced the highest growth rate of all master’s degrees between 1997 and 2007.

At a minimum, if you did away with the “master’s bump” for M. Ed.’s and just evenly distributed the money saved across all teachers, you could prevent teachers from wasting their own time on picking up worthless degrees in order to earn a bit more money. Even better, of course, would be to use the money to create incentives for things that are related to student achievement so as to ensure that the most effective teachers are also the ones least likely to leave the profession. But really the status quo is so far from ideal that almost anything would be an improvement.