Reply to Should a master's degree be required for teachers?

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[quote=Anonymous]I think it's worth the Praxis setting the floor: below this point, you are too dumb to be a teacher or at least too inept to study hard enough to pass not particularly difficult exams.

As far as master's degrees go, the science is as clear as any social sciences study can be, that they're generally between useless and actively harmful for student performance. Shamelessly cribbing from some earlier posts I made on DCUM the last time the subject came up, here are a few of the many studies:

"How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement?  " which 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 paper goes on to say that they think that master's degrees have  no effect, and that the negative trend is either due to selection  effects or small sample sizes.

Here's another one:

"It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755

"Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a  master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching  effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was  earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of  teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become  less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers.  These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher  effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models  that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where  appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher  effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through  eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009." [/quote]

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