Evidence from Kentucky shows this, too

The Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board, which recently was reorganized under the Kentucky Department of Education instead of operating as a separate state agency, just removed the old requirement for all Kentucky teachers to earn a Master’s Degree prior to the end of their 10th year in the classroom.

It’s clear that this seems like a counterintuitive decision to those who have not looked at the research, but that research on the impact of education Master’s Degrees is rather extensive. Let’s look at some of it so you will be better informed than a whole lot of people who are currently tearing their hair out over this change.

To begin, at present not very many states require a Master’s Degree to continue teaching. According to Education Week, with Kentucky no longer in the Master’s required group, only Connecticut, Maryland, and New York continue to have this requirement.

That raises some serious questions for Kentucky. BIPPS readers are well aware of the facts about Kentucky’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) compared to other states, especially for our white students who comprise about four out of five public school students in the Bluegrass State. When you look at comparisons like the one below for NAEP Grade 8 Math for 2017 (assembled with the NAEP Data Explorer web tool),the state clearly performs VERY poorly. So, it’s clear that Kentucky’s former requirement for teachers to obtain a Master’s Degree wasn’t translating into better student performance. Far from it. When the vast majority of the states outperform us, as you see demonstrated on this map, and virtually all don’t require Master’s Degrees to teach, the message is quite apparent.

For sure, our own little piece of evidence above is far from all that has been written about the dubious value of requiring a Master’s Degree to continue teaching.

For example, How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement? a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), says:

“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.” (Pg. 32)

That’s not very encouraging regarding the value of the advanced degree for teaching. And, this is far from the only paper with such sentiments.

In Who Profits from the Master’s Degree Pay Bump for Teachers? Matthew M. Chingos, writing for the Brookings Institution, summarizes:

“The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research.”

Finally, in It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness, folks from Harvard weigh in to say:

“Teacher classroom performance is correlated neither with the type of certification a teacher has earned, nor with the acquisition of an advanced degree, nor with the selectivity of the university a teacher attended. Only on-the job training that comes with each year of experience in the classroom has been regularly identified as a correlate of teacher effectiveness.”

So, Harvard agrees that advanced degrees don’t relate to better teaching. It’s solid on-the-job training and years of experience that do matter. Maybe it is time to put more of our education dollars into those pots.