Teachers with masters degrees are no better, and possibly worse, than other teachers

EdWeek on Charter School Hiring
Voice of San Diego
EMILY ALPERT
March 2, 2009

If you were intrigued by my recent article on the teacher hiring process at High Tech High, take a look at this article from Education Week about how charter school staffing differs from staffing in traditional public schools.

The article cites a study that shows that charter school teachers are less likely to be certified and less likely to have master's degrees than their counterparts in traditional public schools. Charter school teachers, however, were more likely to have undergraduate degrees from top colleges.

But research is raising new questions, the story states, about whether those qualifications matter:

What that research has shown so far is that some seemingly important teacher qualifications, such as having a master's degree, can actually have little, or even a slightly negative, impact on student achievement.





Charters Seen as Lab for Report's Ideas on Teachers
Differences in staffing practices at charter and traditional public schools attract scholars’ interest.
Education Week
February 23, 2009
By Debra Viadero

Devoting an entire section to the issue of teacher quality, the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk laid out seven recommendations for staffing practices aimed at ensuring that “superior teachers can be rewarded, average ones encouraged, and poor ones either improved or terminated.”

Charter schools—unfettered by some of the bureaucratic constraints of traditional public schools—are theoretically in a good position to use just the sorts of tactics the report’s authors thought were needed for hiring and maintaining a high-quality teaching staff. Charter administrators are often freer to fire subpar teachers, for instance, or offer higher pay to job candidates with greater subject-matter expertise.

Yet whether that freedom has translated to a better-quality teaching force for charter schools remains an open, and...