Research And Policy On Paying Teachers For Advanced Degrees
There are three general factors that determine most public school teachers’ base salaries (which are usually laid out in a table called a salary schedule). The first is where they teach; districts vary widely in how much they pay. The second factor is experience. Salary schedules normally grant teachers “step raises” or “increments” each year they remain in the district, though these raises end at some point (when teachers reach the “top step”).
The third typical factor that determines teacher salary is their level of education. Usually, teachers receive a permanent raise for acquiring additional education beyond their bachelor’s degree. Most commonly, this means a master’s degree, which roughly half of teachers have earned (though most districts award raises for accumulating a certain number of credits towards a master’s and/or a Ph.D., and for getting a Ph.D.). The raise for receiving a master’s degree varies, but just to give an idea, it is, on average, about 10 percent over the base salary of bachelor’s-only teachers.
This practice of awarding raises for teachers who earn master’s degrees has come under tremendous fire in recent years. The basic argument is that these raises are expensive, but that having a master’s degree is not associated with test-based effectiveness (i.e., is not correlated with scores from value-added models of teachers’ estimated impact on their students’ testing performance). Many advocates argue that states and districts should simply cease giving teachers raises for advanced degrees, since, they say, it makes no sense to pay teachers for a credential that is not associated with higher performance. North Carolina, in fact, passed a law last year ending these raises, and there is talk of doing the same elsewhere.
As we’ll see, the argument that we should not be granting teachers raises for advanced degrees is not without merit. It is also, however, based on a generalization that sometimes ignores some key variation by degree type and context, and the potential for harnessing these findings in policy.
Before discussing that, however, it bears reiterating that virtually all of the arguments to eliminate raises for advanced educational degrees are based on their association (or lack thereof) with test-based productivity measures such as value-added. Certainly, there is a strong case for assuming that value-added estimates do provide some signal of “true” teacher effectiveness, and for acknowledging that they should play a significant role in this discussion. But they are not the only measure that is available or relevant, and paying teachers for advanced degrees can also have other benefits, such as improving recruitment and retention. In addition, just from the perspective of common sense, it seems ill-advised simply to eliminate incentives for teachers to invest in their education.
Perhaps there is some empirically-backed middle ground here, even if we adopt the purely test-based approach assessing the value of awarding raises for advanced degrees. In general, it is true, as argued by advocates of Shanker Blog » Research And Policy On Paying Teachers For Advanced Degrees: