March 29, 2007

A Dead Horse Named Frozen Assets

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 10:39 pm

Over at the Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey is madly beating a dead horse named Frozen Assets in an effort to bring it back to life as a Kentucky Derby contender. [Check out the blows, here, here and here.] He’s so anxious to place his bets on Frozen Assets that he can’t even wait 24 hours to get a response to his inquiry about why teacher unions might support a salary differential for a Masters degree.

Carey starts by a cherry picking an isolated conclusion out of a valuable research paper, “How and why do teacher credentials matter for student achievement?,” authored by Duke University’s Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd and Jacob L. Vigdor [CLV]. [Here at Edwize, our links send our readers to the free version, so you can actually read the paper for yourself.] The cherry picking is worth pointing out because the general argument of CLV runs quite contrary to the positions that Carey, Ed Sector, and the dead horse Frozen Assets take — that teaching experience and teaching credentials are unimportant to the quality of teaching and to student achievement. To the contrary, CLV conclude “that a teacher’s experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading.”

Carey focuses in on this particular line in the paper:

The estimates indicate that the teachers who received their [Master's] degree prior to entering teaching or any time during the first five years of teachers were no less or no more effective than other teachers in raising student achievement.

Why, he then asks, would teacher unions support a salary differential for a Masters degree that does not create more effective teachers, measured in terms of student achievement?

A meaningful examination of this issue would start from the rather basic understanding that different states have quite different contexts: some states require a Masters degree for permanent teaching licenses; other states do not. CLV’s study is of North Carolina, a state that has a teaching license which requires only a Bachelors degree. By contrast, New York has required a Masters degrees for all permanent teaching certification since 1978. [Update: the historical mavens here at the UFT tell me that in New York City, a Masters degree was a requirement for high school teachers before collective bargaining even began in the early 1960s.] A Masters degree means one thing for a licensed teacher in North Carolina, and something quite different for a licensed teacher in New York.

According to the 2005 Digest of Educational Statistics, the most recent available, in 2000, only 3 in 10 North Carolina teachers had a Masters or other advanced degree — well below the national median. By contrast, 3 in 4 New York teachers possessed a Masters or other advanced degree — well above the national median. The only New York teachers who do not have a Masters degree are those who are at the start of their careers; if a teacher does not obtain their Masters in the years immediately after appointment under their license, they lose that license. If CLV did the same study in New York that they did in North Carolina, they would be looking at quite different realities and would have some very different results.

[According to the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, New York is one of a group of seven states -- Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Nevada, Oregon and Virginia being the others -- which require a Masters degree. Aficionados of the educational blogosphere may recall that Eduwonk's Andy Rotherham, co-founder and co-director of Ed Sector, sits on the state Board of Education for Virgina. Could it be that Rotherham shares responsibility for freezing an asset? As Casablanca's Captain Renault would say: "I'm shocked, shocked..." Perhaps this is why Rotherham thinks that Carey is on a suicide mission.]

Now the Frozen Assets dead horse argued that it was teacher collective bargaining agreements that froze all of these assets. But as it so happens, North Carolina is a so-called “right to work” state that prohibits collective bargaining by public school teachers. It appears that some frozen minds missed that little detail. Insofar as North Carolina school districts have salary differentials for a Masters degree — good, bad or indifferent — it would obviously be the work of elected and appointed officials.

In New York [and in Virginia], a teachers union would negotiate a differential for a Masters degree first because it is a state requirement for permanent licensure. If state certification regulations compel teachers to invest the time and the expense required for a Masters degree, it seems only fitting to organize teacher compensation in ways that provide an appropriate return for that investment. If there really was a case to be made against the efficacy of a Masters degree, then the fair and reasonable thing to do would not to penalize teachers retrospectively, but to first change the state requirement and then reorganize teacher compensation prospectively. But that is NOT what is being proposed. The whole point of “unfreezing” assets is to take away salary differentials from teachers who have followed the rules and done what the state demanded of them.

There is, morever, an important educational reason for teacher unions to support the retention of the Masters degree requirement, beyond the concerns of fairness and reasonableness. Teacher unions are avid supporters of the full professionalization of teaching, and we understand that every profession needs a rigorous induction process, including a full foundational education. All of the significant and powerful professions in American life, such as law and medicine, require a graduate education as an entry gate-keeper into the profession. Our problem is that far too many undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs in schools of education fall far short of professional teaching standards, and do precious little to prepare novices for the challenges of teaching. If teaching is to advance as a profession, and if the quality of American education is to be improved significantly, the quality of teacher preparation programs must also be dramatically improved. Rather than eliminating the Masters degree requirement for teaching licensure, we must make it a more meaningful and useful part of an essential teacher education.

That option may not be a prohibitive favorite at the races, but it certainly beats a bet on a dead horse.

2 Comments

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  • Hey Leo,

    Based on what I know, I agree strongly with you that graduate teacher preperation programs “do precious little to prepare novices for the challenges of teaching”. Also, I am always mystified that we require teachers to get advanced degrees, but we give them several years in which to do it. If the degrees are so important to teaching, why do we give teachers so many years on the job before they have to complete the requirement? It seems that you agree that the whole system is screwed up. Can’t the UFT support suspending the requirement completely until a system is created that can be shown to have some positive effect? The major current effects seem to be: 1. Discouraging many people from entering or staying in the profession because they are burdened with a useless, frustrating and time-consuming requirement; 2. Diverting teacher time that could be spent on educating kids towards time spent on a useless degree; 3. Enriching the schools that offer the degree programs. My sense is that effect #3 is, sadly, winning the “dead horse” race at the moment. As usual, the race isn’t very close.

    Ken

    Comment by curious3 — March 29, 2007 @ 11:04 pm

  • Unions and masters degrees…

    Kevin Carey asks, Why do unions support pay steps for masters degrees? As an historian, I think the question is a bit backwards, but then I think the same of many other policy questions. After all, bureaucratically-oriented salary schedules e…

    Trackback by Sherman Dorn — March 30, 2007 @ 12:15 pm

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