Selling graduate degrees

History/news repeating itself means that I can easily copy/paste from my old posts. It is as simple as that.

Consider this Washington Monthly piece, for instance, which argues that "Teachers across the country earn grad degrees to get raises. Turns out those degrees don’t improve student learning—they just fatten universities’ bottom lines."

Ah, yes, an old issue here at this blog!

Back in September 2011, I warned readers: "Two words to keep in mind: graduate degrees."  I wrote there:

Look at yourself at the mirror and ask this question: "Does one really need a master's degree to teach at the elementary school level?
And then, follow it up with this: "Do instructors at community colleges need doctorates to teach the classes?"
There is a good possibility that your instinct says that a master's degree is not needed for elementary school teachers, and that community college faculty don't need to have the "PhD" tag either.
It is also highly probable that you think it might be a good idea if teachers have those respective advanced degrees.
Now, ask yourself, this: will student learning be increased just because it is an elementary school teacher with a master's degree, or a community college instructor with a PhD?

That was in 2011.

Here is the Washington Monthly in its January/February 2020 issue:

“Most of the research is that there’s either no statistically significant difference, or small significant differences, in teachers with master’s degrees,” said Thomas Kane, an economist and professor of education at Harvard. Matthew Chingos, an education-policy expert at the Urban Institute, has described it as “one of the most consistent findings in education research.” Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, put it more bluntly: “It’s as conclusive as research that finds smoking causes lung cancer. It’s as conclusive as the research on climate change.”

Compare with what I wrote here in 2011:

There is nothing in the literature that shows that student learning is enhanced merely because the teachers have those higher credentials.  In fact, the higher credentials by themselves do not make good teachers.  The advanced degrees are neither necessary, nor sufficient, conditions for improved student learning.  These are simply distractions!

So, why then the push for graduate degrees?  I will quote from my own post first:

The problem comes up because teachers, their unions, and the schools have set up a system in which teachers get a salary bump if they have advanced degrees. ...
Now, think about higher education as an industry.  If you are a higher education professional, you realize that there is an economic incentive for second grade teachers also to get master's degrees.  You then expand into offering those programs

And what does the Washington Monthly say?

Nixing the automatic master’s pay bump, which many experts advocate, would likely face intense resistance from teachers’ unions. It would also draw quiet resistance from a less obvious source: the universities awarding degrees. Data from the Department of Education shows that education master’s degrees are the second most commonly awarded master’s degrees in the country, after MBAs. That makes them an important and reliable source of tuition revenue—as long as teachers feel the need to get them.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with us?!

My bottom-line was:

Taxpayers subsidize the public universities that offer those graduate degree programs.  That is right: we pay for the generation of most of those advanced degrees.  These graduates then earn more because of the very degrees, when those degrees are not even required!

That is no different from this argument that teachers ought to be paid more:

 This money should still go to teachers—it just shouldn’t be tied to an expensive, time-consuming degree with no tangible benefit. Simply giving all teachers higher salaries, says Roza, would be better than having teachers go into debt to get degrees.

Make teaching great again, dammit, instead of wasting money on unnecessary diplomas!

Those damn teachers and their stratospheric salaries!

When it comes to school teachers, over the years, society has managed to make sure that the probability of the smart students choosing that career will be ultra-low.  As I noted in this post more than three years ago, we faculty might whisper about this behind closed doors but never openly and honestly discuss it.  We do not have to wonder where the smart ones are headed.

Society, whether it is here or in the old country, "respects" only those who earn high incomes, which teaching does not offer.  The smart and hardworking students make the rational choice to then head towards Wall Street, the Silicon Valley, and other geographic areas where the roads are paved with the metaphorical gold.

On top of that is the prevailing wisdom that teachers are overpaid anyway.   That always shocks me.  I have always been puzzled at how poorly societies pay teachers. Nonetheless, my fellow citizens have clearly stated that they would rather pay for, say, entertainment than for teachers; the very ones who are shaping the lives of their most valuables ever--their children.

So, over the decades, we nickel-and-dimed teachers.  And we also made sure we made so many negative remarks that there is very little of a feeling of respect and being wanted.  Which is why, as I noted in this post a couple of months ago, teachers were fleeing from Arizona and Kansas, among other places.

Teacher shortage is now a serious problem in many states, and I am not surprised at all.  Those who have never taught have no idea how challenging and stressful the profession is, and how the burnout drives teachers away.

Clark County [Nevada,] like a growing number of school districts across the country—including Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco; and Los Angeles—does indeed have a severe teacher shortage. Even with the marketing campaign, which recruited slightly more than 1,700 teachers to Clark County, the school district still started the school year short about 800 teachers.

Yawn!  No surprise here.

“Well-paying jobs with good conditions don’t have to have gimmicks to attract quality people,” says Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania who studies teacher demographics and retention. “You have to put your money where your mouth is ..."

Of course, more money does not automatically mean better teachers.  But, guess what? Less money means no teachers.  Less money means we begin to scrape from that proverbial bottom of the barrel.  If that's what people want, hey, I have no problems with that, especially when I don't have a kid in the education pipeline!

It’s not just the salaries. It’s also the conditions in Clark County classrooms that drive teachers to leave.
Samantha Jones left Clark County in June after teaching there for eight years. She says she no longer felt respected as a professional.

Yawn!  No surprise here.

My neighbor's granddaughter is an elementary school teacher, into the third year of her young career.  Her class apparently has 45 students.  That is like how it was when I was a student back in the old country.  I am always shocked that society's priorities in this richest country on the planet are so screwed up that the class size here has grown to what we expect to see in resource-constrained developing countries.  And then there is this report:

Teachers always come and go, but in recent years there are some new reasons for the turnover. Polls show that public school teachers today are more disillusioned about their jobs than they have been in many years. One 2013 poll found that teacher satisfaction had declined 23 percentage points since 2008, from 62 percent to 39 percent very satisfied, the lowest level in 25 years. Fifty-one percent of teachers reported feeling under great stress several days a week, an increase of 15 percentage points reporting that level in 1985.

Good job by the ideologues!  But then, hey, when did ideology ever bother with the facts on the ground, right?

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What for an education?

Are we hastily "tracking" children onto a college-bound path right from their high school freshman years, and perhaps even from middle school on?

Over the last couple of years, I have gotten into a habit of chatting with students, especially those in my freshman-level classes, about their reasons for attending college. It never surprises me when I find out that most would be doing something else, if they really had a say in the matter.

But, they end up in college because of the tremendous pressure on them to have a college plan from the moment they enter high school, or even earlier. It is not difficult to imagine that most fifteen year olds have the vaguest idea of career plans, and yet they are forced to think about college and, sometimes, even the kinds of subjects they would like to major in the undergraduate program. As one student recently put it, "I didn't even know how to drive and these people were telling me I had to know what to do in college."

Interestingly enough, similar thoughts about the role of higher education are beginning to preoccupy at least a few educators and parents in India, too.  Spending a hundred days there, and observing the American scene from the other side of the planet, was a learning experience, in this context also.

For instance, the director of the Madras campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, which is recognized as one of the ten best universities in India, noted, tongue-cheek, that the public would prefer a college major even for children in kindergarten!  Meanwhile, he is opening up to the idea that engineering students could take literature classes also during their undergraduate programs.

This need for breadth was echoed by a college classmate, who, unlike me, continued on with a career in engineering, and is now a senior executive at a leading outsourcing firm, and oversees nearly 30,000 employees. His complaint is that it is getting harder for them to recruit college graduates with good thinking and communicating abilities.  He reasons that the system is failing right from the early years of schooling, and worries about the future if schools continued to focus on tests as the pathway to college.

Despite our own healthy experiences of the past, when high schools and colleges promoted thinking and creativity, and despite those from faraway places like India, we tell thousands of Oregon children, explicitly and implicitly, that K-12 schooling is nothing but the road to college.  Even worse is the notion that they are losers in life if they do not go to college immediately after graduating from high school, and many students I have talked with are keen on avoiding that "loser" tag. A new "scarlet letter" that we have created through the schooling process.

We push teenagers to higher education by scaring them about the earnings they could lose. Here, we commit two huge mistakes. First, we simply equate higher education to nothing but a passport to a job, instead of instilling in the young a joy for lifelong-learning as a path towards understanding their own respective potentials, of which earnings is merely one. On top of this, by constantly dangling the dollar sign in front of them, we are almost brainwashing teenagers to think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is nothing but the pursuit of money.

Instead, the young ought to understand something entirely different--life entails making decisions all the time, and that this will mean difficult tradeoffs, which sometimes can be expensive. Thus, we would not simply push teenagers to college because they would otherwise be losers, but we would help them think and act every time they reached a fork in the road of life.  The tradeoffs that Robert Frost so elegantly articulated as "the road not taken."

By focusing on an economic argument, which is weak at best, in order to get students out the high school doors into college, we are rapidly reducing them to mere worker bees who have to compete against those in India and elsewhere.  Is that really what we want from the billions we invest in education?

If we are interested in student learning, does it matter if the teacher has a PhD?

One can easily imagine that many school districts in Oregon will be in situations similar to the Salem-Keizer School District, which is about $20 million short in its budget. 

We can expect education budgets to further tighten up because economic conditions might not dramatically improve soon—neither in Oregon nor in the country.  The anemic recovery from the Great Recession means that serious budget issues will continue to dog school districts for a couple of more years, at least.

If ever a case can be made that a crisis is also an opportunity to reexamine how we have always done business, then, in this context, I hope that school districts and state officials will look into the issue of the master’s degree salary bump.

Oregon, like most states, pays higher salaries to teachers with master’s degrees compared to those who do not.  However, when it comes to student learning and outcomes, there is nothing conclusive about differences between teachers with master’s degrees and otherwise.  Yet, compensation packages for teachers typically are higher for those with the master’s degree.

A national study completed in 2007 estimated that about 2.1 percent of expenditures were caused by the master’s degree bump.  The same study estimated that the master’s bump cost Oregon almost $110 million. 

When officials are searching for pennies in the budgets, and parents are ready to hold bake sales, do we want to overlook this expensive line item?

Advanced credentials alone do not make a successful teacher who can improve student learning.  One only needs to check with students in my classes in order to find out that even a doctorate doesn’t make a good teacher out of me!

To make things worse, by paying more for master’s degrees, we have also instituted an incentive system for the generation of graduate degrees, which are also partly paid for by taxpayers at public universities, including where I teach.  Thus, according to the same study, over a decade, the highest growth rate was in graduates in master’s degrees in education.

That means we taxpayers end up paying twice: first in partly subsidizing the production of these master’s graduates, and then paying higher salaries because teachers have those very degrees.  We do all these even though a master’s degree is neither required nor sufficient to improve student learning.

I should underscore here that this is not any partisan position.  President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, stated a few months ago that “state and local governments should rethink their policies of giving pay raises to teachers who have master’s degrees because evidence suggests that the degree alone does not improve student achievement.”

Perhaps this is the right time to ask ourselves, “does one really need a master's degree to teach at the elementary school level?” 

I love the pursuit of knowledge, and recognize that degree programs offer structured routes to advanced education.  But, with a stalled economic recovery and budget shortfalls, can we afford to pay more for these artificial salary bumps in schools, especially when they do not necessarily improve student learning?

One simple way to save money in K-12 and community colleges

Two words to keep in mind: graduate degrees.

Look at yourself at the mirror and ask this question: "Does one really need a master's degree to teach at the elementary school level?

And then, follow it up with this: "Do instructors at community colleges need doctorates to teach the classes?"

There is a good possibility that your instinct says that a master's degree is not needed for elementary school teachers, and that community college faculty don't need to have the "PhD" tag either.

It is also highly probable that you think it might be a good idea if teachers have those respective advanced degrees.

Now, ask yourself, this: will student learning be increased just because it is an elementary school teacher with a master's degree, or a community college instructor with a PhD?

Perhaps you are beginning to hedge your bets.  It is more likely that you are thinking, "really? A master's degree at a second grade class?"  Or, "hmmm, a PhD to teach basic writing composition?"

If you are hedging, you are not alone.

There is nothing in the literature that shows that student learning is enhanced merely because the teachers have those higher credentials.  In fact, the higher credentials by themselves do not make good teachers.  The advanced degrees are neither necessary, nor sufficient, conditions for improved student learning.  These are simply distractions!

Perhaps at this stage, you are thinking, "well, even if they are not great teachers, isn't it better to have more educated teachers than otherwise?"

Yes, that is absolutely logical indeed.

The problem comes up because teachers, their unions, and the schools have set up a system in which teachers get a salary bump if they have advanced degrees.

Thus, two teachers could be equally lousy or equally awesome, and one could earn more higher than the other only because of the advanced degree.  Even worse: a lousy teacher with advanced degrees could earn more than a good teacher who doesn't have them!

Warming up?  Wait, there is more.

Given that we are talking about taxpayer-funded public schools and community colleges, think about the unnecessary expenditures only because of this rigged system.  Any guesses on how much these cost?  Here is from my own post from nearly two years ago:

A 2007 study estimated that 2.1 percent of all current expenditures can be attributed to teacher compensation related to master’s degrees. Seen another way, the master’s bump costs the average school district $174 per pupil.
... A Nebraska lawmaker, for example, should probably be aware that, on a yearly basis, roughly $81 million dollars—$279 per pupil—are tied up in master’s degrees and thus unavailable for other purposes. During this time of fiscal stringency, it should raise eyebrows when a state automatically allocates over 3 percent of the average per pupil expenditure in a manner that is not even suspected of promoting higher levels of student achievement.

These days, when we are ready to organize bake-sales to fund science labs, we are talking about significant expenses all because of the salary bump for master's degrees.  Take Oregon, for instance: the extra cost as a result of this master's bump is $109,520,560. And this was from a 2007 study, using prior years data.  Update that for the years that have gone by.

Now, think about higher education as an industry.  If you are a higher education professional, you realize that there is an economic incentive for second grade teachers also to get master's degrees.  You then expand into offering those programs:

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.

If you are a concerned taxpayer, by now you are probably getting ticked off.  But, at the same time, you are wondering, "could this be some propaganda?  From disgruntled middle-aged faculty, or worse, from Faux Noose?"

Calm down. Here is what President Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, said:

state and local governments should rethink their policies of giving pay raises to teachers who have master’s degrees because evidence suggests that the degree alone does not improve student achievement.

 You are really upset by now.  I hate to add fuel to the fire; but, I have to.

Taxpayers subsidize the public universities that offer those graduate degree programs.  That is right: we pay for the generation of most of those advanced degrees.  These graduates then earn more because of the very degrees, when those degrees are not even required!

Pulling your hair out?  Wait.

The dollar figures I provided were only for the K-12 system, and not for the community colleges.  Think about the several years to get a PhD--the private and public investment it takes--and these PhD grads getting salary bumps at the community colleges, which then turn around and ask for more taxpayer money.

Have a nice day!

Teachers, and successful students

In my K-12 years, I had quite a few fantastic teachers.  The fact that years later one of them couldn't even vaguely recall me, but could clearly remember so many of my classmates, was, however, a tad depressing :)  From math (or, maths as it was called in India) to English to science .... they were good awesome.

When I was in graduate school, a professor, Jim Moore, and I were once talking about the teachers we learnt from in K-12, and Jim said that perhaps it was thanks to all the gender discrimination that he lucked out with great teachers.  His logic was that talented and qualified women were not encouraged to go into professions.  The only one that was acceptable was, well, teaching.  The net result, Jim figured, he had these awesome teachers who wanted to make the best of the only opportunity that society would allow them to pursue.

I told Jim that might be my story as well, particularly because we lived in an industrial town where spouses couldn't easily find jobs.  Teaching--and vastly underpaid at that--was all they could find.  Lucky for me, and unlucky for them! 

Since then, teaching has been spoilt by people like me, who give the profession nothing but mashed potatoes :)

Here is the funny thing:systematic research is leading us to the same conclusion:

In the 1950s, smart women, except for truly determined trailblazers, had few professional options beyond teaching. Ditto for blacks and other minorities. If you had a particularly smart and ambitious daughter, people would say, "I bet she grows up to be a teacher!" While many things have happened to public schools over the last 50 years, one of the most important is that this low-cost captive labor pool of extremely talented men and women has evaporated completely—and along with it the respect that was once automatically accorded to those who entered the profession.

In some ways, isn't it an irony that by "professionalizing" the profession we have ended up with an attitude that teaching is merely a career choice?  "Should I become a police officer, or a teacher?" does not have the same weight as teaching as a calling, as something one would want to do whether there is money in it or not ... (there is no money in it, as far as I can see, and looking at the bills I have to pay!)

So:

the question remains: How do we lure more, talented people to the profession and give them—and the many superb teachers who already exist—the support and respect they deserve?

Unlike a politician, I am readily willing to admit that my response to that question is this: I have no idea :(