A recent state analysis concludes that millions of education dollars are spent each year rewarding teachers for earning advanced degrees that show little correlation with improved student achievement.
Giving teachers salary “bumps” after they earn master’s degrees in education “is in the drinking water everywhere, but we know the relationship between the degree and student achievement is nonexistent,” said Raegen Miller, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank, who co-wrote the policy brief.
In the July report, the authors suggest that states and districts could free up funding for other types of compensation policies that might promote student achievement by uncoupling such degrees from salary schedules. The brief arrives as the transformation of teacher-compensation systems rises to the top of the national agenda, propelled by the $200 million in additional money provided through the federal economic-stimulus package.
Districts in every state provide additional pay for teachers who hold master’s degrees, either by granting teachers annual stipends on top of their base salaries or by altering the district salary schedule to award “lane” increases. The salary bumps are typically career-long, not just one-shot bonuses.
Counting federal, state, and local funding sources, most states devote 1 to 2 percent of their current annual education expenditures to those added costs, according to the report. In all, states spend about $8 billion annually compensating educators for holding a master’s degree in any subject.
Researchers have found, however, that in certain content areas, such as high school mathematics and science, holding an advanced degree does bear a positive relationship to student achievement. But many more teachers hold master’s degrees in education or school leadership, and there is far less evidence of such a relationship for those degrees.
The cost to states of rewarding teachers for graduate degrees varies depending on the number of teachers in the state, the percentage of those who hold the degree, and the average salary bump teachers receive from acquiring the degree. In terms of per-pupil expenditures, the cost is highest in New York, at $416 per pupil. The cost is lowest in Texas, which has only 27 percent of its teachers holding a master’s degree and awards such teachers only about $1,400 a year in additional pay, an expenditure of $27 per student.
Even though dozens of states and districts (including many in Texas) have begun to set up performance-based pay systems in the past decade, far fewer have examined the cost of master’s degrees. Some of the most prominent performance-pay models allow teachers to make more for earning master’s degrees.
By phasing out bonuses for advanced degrees in education, states could use the savings to institute comprehensive changes to teacher compensation, the report indicates. Although the research connecting performance-based pay to improved student achievement is thin and inconclusive, piloting and evaluating such plans would allow districts to hone in on ways of better aligning pay to goals for boosting student learning, Miller said.
Such reforms could be politically challenging, but districts and states could render them palatable if they grandfathered in current teachers and changed policies only for those entering the profession, the report suggests. Stakeholders with the most to lose from such a restructuring of teacher pay could be schools of education, whose enrollments are supported by the salary incentives currently in place.
—“Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees,” by Marguerite Roza and Raegen Miller, Schools in Crisis: Making Ends Meet, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington Bothell, July 20, 2009.
