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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is the complete opposite of what I learned while getting my MEd.[/quote]

It's not for no reason that studies on the impact of teachers receiving a masters in education will often show that these teachers become less effective.[/quote]

Can you back this up? I buy that MEds are, generally speaking, useless to just barely useful. But your statement is surprising.

-NP with a MS Ed[/quote]

Sure! Here are two of the more spectacular papers:

"How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement?" looks at a massive dataset of North Carolina students and  teachers from third to eighth grade.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12828/w12828.pdf

See section starting page 32

"Graduate degrees 
  One of the most counterintuitive findings to emerge from the basic models is the 
 small or negative effects of having a graduate degree. Most of those degrees are master’s 
 degrees that generate higher salaries for teachers. A negative coefficient would suggest 
 that having such a degree is not associated with higher achievement. Thus, if the goal of 
 the salary structure were to provide incentives for teachers to improve their teaching, the 
 higher pay for master’s degrees would appear to be money that is not well spent, except 
 to the extent that the option of getting a master’s degree keeps effective experienced 
 teachers in the profession..."

The authors of the paper goes on to say that they think that master's degrees have  no effect, and they think the negative trend is either due to selection effects or small sample sizes. Which is a rather hopeful interpretation.

This next paper uses a huge data set from Florida. There is a somewhat positive effect for middle school math. But the results in table 12 show a slight negative impact of master's degree on elementary school math performance and the huge negative impact on HS math performance, which was twice the size of the positive impact seen in MS.   A degree also causes a negative impact for  MS & HS reading, and the authors caution that there's further potential for  negative effects while the teacher is obtaining the degree, as it takes  time and energy away from the classroom.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509656.pdf

"We consider the impact of advanced degrees in Table 12. Since our model includes 
 teacher fixed effects, post-baccalaureate degrees earned prior to the period of analysis wash out 
 when we demean the data. Thus our approach measures the impact of changes in the possession 
 of an advanced degree (for a given teacher) during the period of study.20

[Note 20 The estimated coefficient on the advanced-degree variable measures the average productivity differential between 
 the time before and the time after receipt of the degree. Before the degree is received some knowledge may have 
 already been acquired through coursework already completed, thus biasing the estimated effect toward zero. 
 However, work toward an advanced degree may take away from time available for class preparation and other 
 teaching-related activities, which would tend to lower productivity before receipt of the degree and upwardly bias 
 the estimated impact of the degree.]

Our results indicate that obtaining an advanced degree during one’s teaching career is positively correlated with teacher 
 productivity only in the case of middle school math. For elementary teachers there is no 
 correlation between receipt of an advanced degree and performance. For middle school reading 
 teachers and both math and reading high school teachers there is actually a significant negative 
 association between attainment of an advanced degree and measured productivity. This may be 
 because graduate degrees include a combination of pedagogy and content and our other evidence 
 suggests that only the latter has a positive influence on teacher productivity. 
 Other explanations for the graduate degree results arise from issues of methodology. 
 Most previous studies suffer from selection bias, as noted earlier, and our solution is to study the 
 effects of graduate degree attainment within teachers using teacher fixed effects. However, this 
 approach imposes the implicit assumption that the receipt of the graduate degree reflects a 
 sudden infusion of new preparation. In reality, the receipt of the degree is the culmination of 
 several years of graduate courses whose influence may already be reflected in the teacher effects, 
 especially for those teachers who take graduate courses over many years before receiving a 
 graduate degree. Another possibility is that teachers load up on courses in the academic year 
 preceding the receipt of the degree and therefore have less time to devote to their students. We 
 found evidence above of such a contemporaneous decline in productivity when we considered 
 the effects of other forms of professional development"

Now, it's definitely possible that there are specific programs that are actually useful, instead of null-to-bad. Mississippi, for example, had a huge bipartisan push to drag its education schools kicking and screaming away from three-cuing/balanced literacy and into phonics, and some middle/high school math education programs (WGU?) make it seem like the boost to content knowledge they provide would make up for any terrible instructional techniques that might be on offer. But that is speculative.[/quote]

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