Bruce Baker continues to be one of our most valuable academic scholars of educational madness.
In this post, he explores and explodes the claim by certain economists that teachers should not get a pay increase for anything except higher test scores. This is the only value that they ever add to a school.
On the basis of this absurd claim, states are now passing laws to deny teachers any salary increment for masters’ degrees. The theory, based on the work of aforesaid economists, is that additional education does not increase test scores (except in mathematics).
So, the teacher who wants to deepen their knowledge of science or history or obtain a degree in special education will see no salary increment. The not-so-subtle message from the state legislators is: Getting extra education is worth nothing to this state! Forget education, just produce higher test scores! At some point, maybe the legislators will just turn the schools over to test prep companies and forget about teachers altogether. If they find that high school students can produce higher test scores, they may stop requiring a college degree for future teachers.
Baker writes:
It may be entirely reasonable for local public school districts to provide additional compensation for teachers seeking graduate credentials that expand their possible involvement in district or school activities, such as achieving additional training to work with special needs populations, or additional content certifications, or for that matter additional training to engage in all of the new teacher observations [Tom] Kane and others now seem to think are necessary for getting rid of bad teachers (even though his own work on MET did not support his own conclusion in this regard). That is, you might want to have the salary differential available for the utility player.
It may also be an entirely reasonable approach for school districts to view providing additional compensation for furthering one’s education as a useful tool for retaining teachers – especially those who themselves show interest in expanding their own knowledge/learning.
In both this, and the previous case, the additional degrees or credentials obtained may actually have no direct relationship to the current primary responsibilities of the teacher. Does that mean they are entirely useless? That they should not be in any way associated with differentiated compensation not only until they are used, but until they are used in such a way that we can estimate that the additional credential has led to test score gains?
That’s just freakin’ asinine.
And this reductionist thinking really needs to stop.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So according to economists, education is bad for education? Don’t they themselves have advanced degrees? It’s hard to follow because my own worthless advanced degrees in my academic subject have stultified me with their lack of added value.
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Interesting…. so perhaps we should pay economists based on the accuracy of their models. Hmmm. One year of teachers being evaluated by test scores in NY, results dropped 30%.
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I don’t think the question policy makers should ask is if a policy like paying for teachers to get masters degrees is entirely useless, but if it is the most useful way to spend the money dedicated to educating students. Might wrap around health services be a more effective way to spend the money? Perhaps dropping class size would have a larger impact than having a masters degree from the University of Phoenix?
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Quite valid concerns TE.
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Why not have both in one of the richest nations in the world?
Other countries tax theri rich more – and their middle class more – to pay for social infrastrutcture instead of having such a focus on market choice, as in a system of guarantees . . .
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There are always going to be trade offs between devoting resources to any endeavor, including education. No matter how much is spent on education, another dollar would do some student some good. The question is what is the opportunity cost of spending that dollar on education? We will have to give up something.
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Let’s give up war and corporate welfare – that wouldn’t be an opportunity cost, it would be an opportunity benefit.
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Certainly many would agree with you, but there will always be an opportunity cost as long as we have limited resources and limited ability to turn those resources into the necessities and luxuries that people desire.
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I studied this correlation in grad school (I know, the irony!) and in my analysis of 10 different studies about how advanced degrees affect teachers’ ability to reduce the achievement gap, it appeared to be that when a teacher gets an advanced degree, if s/he is putting that stuff to work, s/he may move out of the classroom, and the teachers who remain in the classroom may be otherwise non-promotable – they may have gotten the degree for a pay bump or some other reason, or because s/he wasn’t promoted, s/he burns out and/or becomes demoralized. This is true for Nat Board Certified teachers as well, and it seems to be truer in urban districts where the teaching life cycle is much more compressed.
It is ludicrous to connect a measure of teacher quality with test scores for any number of reasons, but if you’re gonna do it, you should keep human nature in mind. Also keep in mind that economists create regression models to plug in empty data (which there is plenty of in these massive data sets) so their models may be demonstrating trends that are self-fulfilling.
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I am trying to understand your post. Am I correct in thinking that your meta study reviewed that
1) there appears to be no relationship between the size of the achievement gap and teachers having advanced degrees and
2) your explanation for this is that the strong and motivated teacher uses the advanced degree to leave the classroom leaving only weaker, less motivated teachers with advanced degrees in the classroom along with the mix of stronger and weaker teachers without advanced degrees?
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What corporate reform continues to prove: Those bent upon self-service transform themselves into idiots.
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deutsch29: this reminds me of a mangled Mark Twain quote—
“If a corporate reformer could be crossed with an idiot, it would improve the corporate reformer but deteriorate the idiot.” [Mark Twain]
So don’t be hatin’ on the idiots…
🙂
P.S. Because you have an advanced degree, I could have—but didn’t—restrain myself from adding another mangled Mark Twain quote. According to the latest roundup of unconfirmed rumors, noted EduEconomist Eric Hanushek has a plague, er, plaque that says: “Ignorance makes the man. Educated people have little or no influence on society.”
There is a 98% chance of ‘satisfactory’ [thank you, Bill Gates!] certainty that this last is true—although it’s a two-edged sword, right? I mean, he’s got a Ph.D. too, and wouldn’t he need to be crossed with an idiot to have a shot at improvement?
Sorry, all this adding, subtracting and crossing with has me confused. I’ll just leave the numbers to you and Gary R and Dr. Bruce Baker and GFBrandenburg and Jersey Jazzman.
My bad.
😦
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The obvious follow-up question: granting that masters’ degrees in education could hypothetically have some benefit to students outside of test scores, is there any evidence at all for such a benefit? Baker does not seem to be aware of any such evidence, but is anyone else?
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I could not find the actual study data on this but this seems to contradict MAs having no affect on student scores:
http://www.edweek.org/tsb/articles/2012/02/29/02effect.h05.html
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Um, correlation is not causation.
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Yes, and misinterpreting or misstating results does not make it true.
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Yes, so don’t do it. The chart you presented would look the same if we were charting “higher NAEP scores vs. presence of lacrosse fields,” but that doesn’t mean lacrosse fields actually cause higher NAEP scores, it just means that wealthy parents/districts spend their greater amount of money in different ways.
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Tell that to Kane!
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Kane isn’t misinterpreting anything. In any event, I’m still waiting for a response to my question. Apparently no such evidence exists . . . .
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“Kane isn’t misinterpreting anything”, oops, I ‘m bad! Until that statement I thought you were just ignorant not an ignorant troll!
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There are several studies that indicate this. Here is a partial list:
Borman, G. D., & Kimball, S. M. (2005). Teacher quality and educational equality: do teachers with higher standards-based evaluation ratings close student achievement gaps? The Elementary School Journal, 106(1), 3-20.
Easton-Brooks, D. and Davis, A. (2009). Teacher quality and the achievement gap in the early primary grades. Education Policy Analysis Archives 17(15). Retrieved 12/29/12 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v17n15/.
Goldhaber, D. & Anthony, E. (2007). Can teacher quality be effectively assessed? National Board Certification as a signal of effective teaching. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 89(1), 134-150.
Grossman, P., Loeb, S., Cohen, J., Hammerness, K., Wyckoff, J., Boyd, D., & Lankford, H. (2010) Measure for measure: the relationship between measures of instructional practice in middle school English language arts and teachers’ value-added scores. (Working Paper No. 16015). National Bureau of Economic Research website: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16015 [forthcoming in the American Journal of Education, n.d.]
Phillips, K. J. R. (2010). What does “highly-qualified” mean for student achievement? Evaluating the relationships between teacher quality indicators and at-risk students’ mathematics and reading achievement gains in first grade. The Elementary School Journal, 110(4), 464-490. Doi: 10.1086/651192
Rivkin, S. G., Hanushek, E. A., and Kain, J. J., (2005). Teachers, schools and academic achievement. Econometrica, 73(2), 417–58.
But the analysis is based on the [flawed] premise that quality is indicated by raising test scores.
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Some of the commenters seem to be making the assertion that advanced degrees are a big waste of time, especially for educators/teachers. Who knew?
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Perhaps a valid point is that encouraging teachers to pursue Masters degrees is a signal to students about the ethic and value of life-time learning. Do we teach students that schooling is purely utilitarian? If so, do economists/reformers make arguments about schooling that are not about purely utilitarian gains?
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What lesson are children taught about education when teachers get graduate degrees in order to earn more money? It seems like education is strictly utilitarian by those teachers,
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In what other industry are the workers not compensated or even penalized for their years of service, attainment of more education and training? Only Education. Only in America.
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Look at CEOs, have to wonder if they could crowdsource the job and get better results at no cost. Just a theory.
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Outside of the public sector there is not a tight link between years of service, education, and salary. Even at my public university, it is the most recently hired faculty member at every rank (assistant professor, associate professor, or full professor) that is usually paid the most at the rank.
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In the real economic world the average B.A. gets about $55,000, Masters about $75,000 and PHD’s over $90,000. No, not in education where education is supposed to be paramount. What a joke to education that teachers who go get high degrees get nothing for it, or almost nothing for that higher education which is normally the pathway to a better career and pay. Not here, spend the money and time and you get almost nothing for your effort as we don’t really care that you are at the top of the game in your field just suck it in and go back to the classroom fool. That is the real message. For more than 22 years I have thought they were insane and in reverse for this attitude and policy and procedure in contracts. How do the unions allow this? Are they on the same planet? I don’t think so for a lot of reasons such as also allowing false charges and illegal terminations for years. When I started on teacher retribution in 1995 it was old and we estimated 4-600 in teacher jail in 1995.
As soon as the iPad debacle is released CORE-CA is going into this issue. Tonight Steve Zimmer is having the groundbreaking Title 1 meeting at Venice High School at about 7:00 P.M.
I have had discussions with teachers and some us are meeting to start the approach on this issue. At LAUSD, when we make them change from the $1,000 iPad to the $200 laptop guaranteed for 5 years there will be enough money from just textbooks for reinstating physical education and the arts for free with saved money from the general fund not the illegal use of bond funds. Then there is at least $60-90 million in savings from the instructional material and supplies fund which we would like to spend on proper pay for teachers and extra credentials, one friend has 8, and high degrees to show them respect for personal improvement.
Teachers will love it and the corporate pigs will come out in force to steal the money for themselves. This is going to be fun to see them go crazy as they will by the time we are done with them with our interesting approaches we have in mind. I mean “Mind” literally.
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