Probably not. There is some benefit in the hard sciences for high school students. Little else.
Ladd and Sorensen’s seminal 2015 paper on this topic used administrative data from North Carolina to assess the effects of teachers earnings Master’s degrees with fixed effects for teachers, students, and schools. With these fixed effects, it’s possible to estimate the effect of Master’s degrees after accounting for things that are constant among these groups. Thus, the question from this study is less ‘Do teachers’ Master’s degrees correlate with their success?’ and closer to ‘Does being conferred a Master’s degree make teachers more successful?’ The answer is a resounding ‘no’, with the only effect being on rates of high absenteeism among the kids, for some reason.
11 comments:
The textbook writers should have some domain knowledge, though.
i thought of that essay you had previously shared while reading the article.
The original link broke, so I found a new one (and edited the old post :-) )
The relative success of homeschoolers could also be used in evaluating the need for advanced degrees. I wonder if the records are adequate to do a study.
I don't know that they need advanced degrees, but it would help if they had degrees in the subject they teach instead of in "education."
According to the article, not as much as you'd expect.
To state the obvious, primary education is about teaching the basics. The further you get from that, the worse the education is. In trying to teach advanced concepts, teachers are failing to teach the basics, from which the advanced concepts originate. One understands the impulse; after all, the basics are boring. But. The basics are necessary, and sometimes (or often) one with a firm grasp of the basics does a better job of imparting them than one seduced by the more esoteric aspects.
Education schools focus on teaching teachers to encourage students to love learning, reasoning that this will create lifelong learners. It's a gentle theory which has the disadvantage of being completely false. People do tend to love what they are good at, but the causation does not work in the other direction.
We look back and think we were inspired by a topic or a teacher and that is what worked. That is a retrospective illusion of a story-making species. It is a destructive ideology.
I have very mixed feelings about this. Background: I've been a teacher and I took a year of graduate education courses. They were helpful, although two of the courses were helpful in ways I wouldn't necessarily expect to show up in scores on standardized tests and the helpful parts of the four pedagogy courses could easily have been condensed to two courses with no loss. Yes, they were generally less rigorous than the courses for my MA in history.
As for my mixed feelings, first, I agree with the main thrust of the post. Credentialism is a weed that should be carefully taken out by the roots and burned. Whether it's education or hairdressing or medicine (yes, even medicine), we need to look at what is really necessary and get rid of things that are just serving as barriers to entry and competition. (Also, though, this is partly a legal problem. In the one law class I took, the professor drilled it into us that, in our system, "Any fool can sue any other fool for any fool reason." Credentials serve as legal protection in such a system, so to get rid of credentialism entails some legal reform as well, another thorny issue.)
However, I don't think either GPA, as course grades are currently handled in public K-12 schools, or standardized tests, which are limited in what they can assess, are good measures of education on the whole. In fact, I think the increasing emphasis on standardized test scores has damaged our education system. Consequently, I'm not that impressed by these studies.
Maybe I should be. I could see immediately using them to argue for reducing credentialism in k-12 systems. I could also see using them as part of a broader argument that the K-12 system is thoroughly broken and should be dismantled and rebuilt, including university education departments / colleges, which should be largely eliminated. So, yeah, that's good.
And yet, I think they may also be pointing out the failings of GPA and standardized testing as measures of education. After all, is the advanced education worthless because it doesn't improve these measures, or is its real value nullified because the GPA system and standardized testing regimes are messed up? Imagine an education system that is highly regulated due to the high importance placed on GPA and standardized test results such that the teachers both with and without advanced degrees are forced to teach the same things in the same way. In such a system, of course advanced degrees won't matter, but it's not the advanced education that's the cause.
So ... yes: Credentialism bad, advanced education degrees and certifications iffy (probably should be eliminated for 90% of their current uses). But also, the use of GPA and standardized test results should be strictly limited to things they actually assess well and not be turned into universal measures of the quality of education. Using them as universal measures when they cannot measure universally is bad science.
I think you should have a go at an essay about what such an education would look like. I promise to link to it.
"Using them as universal measures when they cannot measure universally is bad science."
True. However, absence of metrics are not a solution either. For some courses, I do think that there are well established educational pathways, notably phonics, and the multiplication and division tables. There are other courses well suited to drilling, and others that are not. Nonetheless, there must be some measure of what is taking place. Are they learning, or not? It is important to have an answer. "What matters gets measured." So how should we measure?
AVI, thanks. I just finished a killer semester and plan to sleep for a couple of days (or, at least, do nothing productive). I'll give it some thought this weekend.
Tom, yes, I agree that we need to have good assessments of whether students are reaching educational goals and there are some proven methods for some of these things. That said, not everything that matters can be measured. E.g., how important is it that students develop a strong sense of academic integrity? If it's important, how do you assess it? How do you quantify it? "Hey, nobody got caught cheating, so they must have developed a strong sense of academic integrity!" is hardly a good metric. They could take a quiz on it, but knowing what your teacher thinks about academic integrity is not the same as actually making it part of one's beliefs.
On the other hand, if you are thinking of solely of knowledge and abilities that are explicitly taught, the Student Learning Objectives, at some point you just have to trust the teacher's assessment. Can high school students read a set of articles that express a range of conflicting opinions about a topic and then come to a considered opinion of their own? Can they read a novel and understand the plot, characters, setting, etc., and express a reasonable opinion about the larger meaning of the novel? Someone has to take them through the exercise and then assess how well they did. The teacher is the most reasonable person to do these things.
The problem is, we don't trust teachers anymore, and frankly that's often for good reasons. We've been talking about grade inflation for decades now, so what confidence can we have that the grades really reflect student learning? For that matter, since grade inflation has meant students generally getting better grades than they deserve, what parent is going to go argue that their child really should have gotten a C instead of an A? Or an F instead of a C?
We also suspect teachers grade according to their own biases, politics (e.g. social justice), etc., or we think they're just incompetent. And, honestly, some parents just don't think their kids should ever get a bad grade (or ever do anything wrong whatsoever, for that matter) and will make the teacher and the principle's lives miserable about it if the grade isn't bumped up.
In any case, since we don't trust teachers to properly assess student learning, we look for other ways to assess, and often we want measurements that we can use to force teachers to teach the right thing or the right way, however we see that.
I could go on, but I think it's time for a glass of mead and some good music.
I'd also like to add that I am all in favor of homeschooling where it's possible and that my comments are not an attack on standardized tests. They have a place. I just think we need to be clear about what they validly assess and not go beyond that.
Cheers!
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