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Do teachers need advanced degrees?

cremieux.xyz

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Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#41

Post by CivBase »

rao-v wrote: post #30

My understanding is that, these days, a lot of advanced degrees held by teachers are in Education, not say Math or History. I’d love to see this data recut by degree type. Edit - wow we’re talking about 50-70% of the masters being in Education, Special Education or Admin fields. (Page 14: https://mhec.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/202510-MHEC-Grad... ) This data is basically telling us nothing about the value of a t…

My wife is a teacher. She wanted to teach history, so she had to get a history degree with a specialization in education. But there were no jobs available, so she accepted a conditional as a special education teacher. That's what drove her to get a master's degree in special ed.

While doing teaching special ed she developed a fondness for teaching math. But she isn't allowed to take on a general ed math class because she doesn't have a "math endorsement" - which would require her to go back to school again for basically another advanced degree in math. And she can't get a general ed job in history because it's too competitive and her years of experience makes her too expensive compared to fresh blood.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#42

Post by platevoltage »

EtienneDeLyon wrote: post #9
m348e912 wrote: post #2

Teaching salaries start at $48,112 on average. If schools want advanced degrees the industry needs to pay more, and that's beyond whatever adjustment the provide for holding an advanced degree.

When you overpay teachers, people who hate teaching, and hate being teachers, will become teachers for the money. Is a good idea to select the people who hate teaching to become teachers?

You made an assertion that is based in fantasy, and then asked a question based on this silly assertion. Just wow.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#43

Post by platevoltage »

class3shock wrote: post #17
EtienneDeLyon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you overpay teachers, people who hate teaching, and hate being teachers, will become teachers for the money. Is a good idea to select the people who hate teaching to become teachers?

When you underpay teachers, people who hate teaching, and hate being teachers, will become teachers because all the people that had better options did something else.

And then you will have people who absolutely love teaching, and are willing to live in poverty to do so, speckled around that cess pool of mediocrity. It reminds me of high school actually.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#44

Post by next_xibalba »

m348e912 wrote: post #2

Teaching salaries start at $48,112 on average. If schools want advanced degrees the industry needs to pay more, and that's beyond whatever adjustment the provide for holding an advanced degree.

Most public K-12 teachers teach 9 months out of the year. So annualizing that salary gets you to $64,149. Supposing a two income household of two teachers earning that amount ($128,299), the household would be earning a good bit above the median household income of $83,730.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#45

Post by ViscountPenguin »

next_xibalba wrote: post #40
shalmanese wrote: post #35

FYI: the author of this piece is the eugenicist Cremieux who was responsible for using hacked data to attack Zohran Mamdani for checking Black and Asian on his college application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker

What do they call this type of argument, again? Ad hominem?

If someone has a historical of unethical behaviour it's reasonable to want significantly more evidence for their claims.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#46

Post by syntaxing »

Hot take, I truly believe the answer for HS is yes. I grew up in a school district where the teachers had to have a master degree in the subject they were teaching. Those teachers strongly shaped me who I am today and I believe their advanced degree helped them become great teachers.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#47

Post by freehorse »

These things may differ from place to place, but in places I know most teachers get advanced degrees because that is one of the very few ways one can increase their salary. Some get in order to get promotion to higher administrative-managerial, non-teaching positions. Prospective teachers get one for increasing their prospects of getting hired. Many of them may actually not even get advanced degrees in the very subject they teach, especially if it is a harder one. They often choose fields like special education for which there exists an established industry of producing degrees in some places (moreover devaluing the degrees of the ones who actually study special education), or anything remotely relevant, but actually not. From what I briefly saw in some of the articles, the researchers don't check about specific degree field but "educational attainment" in general.

In general, quite a few people probably do not get degrees in order to get in depth knowledge on the subject they teach. This, along with other factors, makes imo the conclusions more about the current "credential" system than whether actually getting more in depth knowledge affects teaching. Of course, the educational system has a lot more problems than teachers not having master degrees in their fields, but going from anticredentialism to asserting that getting formal advanced (or even any) education in a field is useless is not imo warranted.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#48

Post by Jedd »

next_xibalba wrote: post #40
shalmanese wrote: post #35

FYI: the author of this piece is the eugenicist Cremieux who was responsible for using hacked data to attack Zohran Mamdani for checking Black and Asian on his college application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker

What do they call this type of argument, again? Ad hominem?

Are you referring to parent's or TFA's 'argument' here?

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#49

Post by next_xibalba »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #45
next_xibalba wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they call this type of argument, again? Ad hominem?

If someone has a historical of unethical behaviour it's reasonable to want significantly more evidence for their claims.

Perhaps you could share what this person's history of unethical behavior is? Lasker is called a eugenicist by the GP and in the Wikipedia article, but when I read the cited sources, they look a lot more like opinion pieces pushing a viewpoint rather than hard news.

Re: Do teachers need advanced degrees?

#50

Post by eipi10_hn »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #45
next_xibalba wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they call this type of argument, again? Ad hominem?

If someone has a historical of unethical behaviour it's reasonable to want significantly more evidence for their claims.

Then just show which claims need more evidence in their articles.
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