North Carolina ends increased pay for teachers holding master degrees

[IrishJohn]

This is disturbing and wrong. I hope this doesn't become a trend. I can understand about tenure and teacher evaluations but not this.

North Carolina ends pay boosts for teacher master's degrees | Fox News

[Yanji]

I don't really qualify as a fiscal conservative in the current far-right US political climate (I believe government should try to realize important outcomes for the people at a low cost, not that less government is always better) but I don't think it's wrong to question whether a Master's degree actually makes people better teachers. MA/MEd degrees for public school teachers are among the most common evening/distance degrees out there because of the way teacher compensation works in most states, and many of them are so "soft" or irrelevant that they're unlikely to make students better teachers. I think teachers should get an automatic pay increase if they've conducted scholarly work in some sort of thesis/research Master's degree (or even a coursework degree, as long it's relevant), but if a biology teacher gets a MA in Liberal Studies from Hicktown State, I don't think they merit extra pay just because they have a piece of paper which would be largely worthless in the "real world" anyway.

(I believe teaching should be a more respected profession and that all teachers should get paid more)

[sanantone]

When I was briefly in an alternative teacher certification program, the school districts I looked at only paid more for master's degrees in something education-related or a major related to the subject taught by the teacher. I was thinking about becoming certified in life science. My master's in security studies would not have gotten me incentive pay.

[cookderosa]

I moved to North Carolina about 9 months ago. I live in Charlotte, where there are MORE private schools than public, and with a HUGE homeschool population that exceeds 20,000 students. Why? Because NC ranks among the lowest education systems in our country. That said, I have a mixed feeling about this decision. In one breath, it argues what homeschool parents have argued all along: you don't need to be highly educated to teach. In fact, some argue that the two are not always correlated, which this article starts to point out. I probably agree if we're talking about average kids in a well-funded school district. If you start factoring in special education, learning disabilities, very low socio-economic communities, etc., then I think these teachers DO need a bit more training on classroom management.
On the other hand, we need to consider the message this sends to the kids and potential future teachers and community at large. This tells our teachers that their growth potential/income / job security is capped, and if they can't live on $X then they shouldn't go into teaching. North Carolina can't find teachers, we have a dismal situation here. I can't imagine how this will really help.

[dlb]

This is truly shameful. I have a friend that is going through this situation, and have spoken to many other teachers here in North Carolina that said they have seen this coming for a while now. Its just as bad as lowering salaries for police and fire officials - public service positions... you name it. Personally, I feel that teachers should be amongst the highest paid individuals. (And they wonder why teachers/instructors are so hard to find.)

[clep3705]

Here are the liberals calling for an end to compensating teachers extra for having a useless master's degree. They are okay with a useful master's degree; The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement | Center for American Progress

[Yanji]

Personally, I feel that teachers should be amongst the highest paid individuals. (And they wonder why teachers/instructors are so hard to find.)

Currently, the standards for teachers are way too low in most of America to justify higher pay to the extent you're suggesting. In other developed countries, most of which far out-achieve the US in education, such as Finland, Hong Kong and the UK, the government takes a much harder line on education and demand more from people who want to be teachers. I think I mentioned before how you can get certified to teach in Massachusetts in any subject as long as you can pass the MTEL, which itself is an extremely simple test. Most other states have barely higher standards. I understand wanting to allow people to career switch into teaching, but when most other countries generally require the equivalent of at least 30 credits of formal education in the subject you want to teach plus an education degree/certificate, I think most lower-income American education districts will fail to be competitive on an international level. With that being said, I reject the idea that American education is "broken", because there are plenty of good public schools in the US and at the end of the day it's a combination of racial inequality, income disparity and weak government which leads to poorly-performing schools. There's a reason why Prince George's County in MD has terrible schools and Fairfax County in VA, just across the Potomac, has great schools, and teachers themselves are only a very small part of that equation.

Here are the liberals calling for an end to compensating teachers extra for having a useless master's degree. They are okay with a useful master's degree; The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement | Center for American Progress

Interesting how Virginia has arguably the best education system in the country at all levels but they have a relatively low "Master's bump" and low-ish rate of teachers with a Master's degree. I know VA education is partly skewed because of the super-rich counties in NoVA but it seems to support the idea that the Master's degrees most teachers get are largely ineffectual and a waste of public money.

[sanantone]

Currently, the standards for teachers are way too low in most of America to justify higher pay to the extent you're suggesting. In other developed countries, most of which far out-achieve the US in education, such as Finland, Hong Kong and the UK, the government takes a much harder line on education and demand more from people who want to be teachers. I think I mentioned before how you can get certified to teach in Massachusetts in any subject as long as you can pass the MTEL, which itself is an extremely simple test. Most other states have barely higher standards. I understand wanting to allow people to career switch into teaching, but when most other countries generally require the equivalent of at least 30 credits of formal education in the subject you want to teach plus an education degree/certificate, I think most lower-income American education districts will fail to be competitive on an international level. With that being said, I reject the idea that American education is "broken", because there are plenty of good public schools in the US and at the end of the day it's a combination of racial inequality, income disparity and weak government which leads to poorly-performing schools. There's a reason why Prince George's County in MD has terrible schools and Fairfax County in VA, just across the Potomac, has great schools, and teachers themselves are only a very small part of that equation.

I don't think the U.S. public education system is significantly worse than that of other developed nations. The main thing the U.S. has to contend with is child poverty. UNICEF looked at 35 developed nations and the U.S. had the second highest child poverty rate. One of the most important factors in a child's success in school is parental involvement. Children who come from economically disadvantaged families are more likely to have less parental involvement. Even when you place impoverished students into private schools, their performance is not going to significantly improve in most cases. The best thing many European countries have done for education is to almost dramatically reduce child poverty. The only reasons why some charter schools perform better than some public schools in most cases is that there is

1. Self selection bias. Parents who attempt to enroll their children in a charter school tend to be parents who are involved in their child's education. (The same thing applies to private schools.)
2. Charter schools regularly reject special education students.
3. Charter schools can expel students for underperformance.
4. Charter schools will reject applicants if they feel like the parent is not going to be very involved during the interview.

Map: How 35 countries compare on child poverty (the U.S. is ranked 34th)

It's more about attitudes toward education. Does the student want to learn? Did the student's parents instill a culture in him/her that values education? Then, there are other factors such as coming from single-parent homes and having a parent(s) who works two jobs and is rarely home to monitor what the student is doing.

Are Private Schools Really Better? - TIME

There is one school district in my city I know a lot about because I've lived in the same area of town my whole life and attended that school district since kindergarten. The lowest performing schools in that district just happen to have the highest percentage of economically disadvantaged students. The highest performing schools are located in the wealthiest part of the district. People are often under the assumption that one school is better than another because the test scores are better. The truth is that affluent students are generally going to perform better on tests no matter which school they attend.

[clep3705]

Most teachers who get a master's degree get a master's in education. If paying the teacher extra for the degree is wasteful, what about the public funds subsidizing the schools that offer the degrees? We complain about corporate welfare, but there is a lot of academic welfare.

A master's degree in education requires very little infrastructure beyond office space and classroom space. These graduate students bring incremental revenue at low cost. Additionally, these degrees tend to have a lot of students over the summer when public school teachers are on the summer break. Normally tuition and building use fee revenues at universities drop off in the summer. Teachers going to graduate school provide a good revenue stream during this time of low revenue.

[IrishJohn]

Here are the liberals calling for an end to compensating teachers extra for having a useless master's degree. They are okay with a useful master's degree; The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement | Center for American Progress

Some interesting ideas and I might agree to an extent about certain master's degrees, but subject degrees I think can improve the knowledge and quality of teachers. That's obviously not always true and perhaps some performance evaluation is needed, yet I very much dislike the idea of capping teachers off at the bachelor level which this NC proposal would most assuredly do. If I were a teacher in NC I wouldn't bother with the time or the expense of a master degree now.