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Over the past several years, many in the education industry have debated the significance of master’s degrees for teachers, and often also whether this higher degree warrants more pay. Many blogs have commented on this issue, including Education Week blogs, university blogs, and newspaper blogs.

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), a member of the Learning First Alliance, is also contributing to the conversation. Their website currently highlights the controversial issue of the relationship between teacher master’s degrees and student classroom success.

They note recent comments by Bill Gates and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that little current evidence suggests a positive correlation between the two, and that therefore we should question the efficacy of master’s degrees and the validity of rewarding them monetarily. Two organizations - the Higher Education Consortium for Special Education and the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children - have responded by writing letters to these two influential public figures, pointing out an IES- supported 2010 study on special education teachers in Florida that found a positive correlation between advanced degrees and student improvement, especially in math.

AACTE’s discussion of this issue highlights two broader problems with claims that master’s degrees are not beneficial for teaching: one, such claims lump all master’s programs together; and two, almost all current research into the topic considers the effectiveness of master’s degree only in terms of standardized test scores. It doesn’t look at the impact of these degrees on specific populations like special education students, or on educational aspects not reflected in standardized tests. Given this resounding lack of information, it is impossible to ascertain the true significance of master’s degrees.

Regarding the first point, it seems both unscientific and unfair to fail to differentiate among master’s programs. Some may indeed be poor or ineffectual, but it is equally plausible that others are beneficial and worthy of emulation. By teasing out which programs have encouraging classroom effects, research could help aid master’s programs and ultimately the teaching profession by noting what works.

Regarding the second, most education professionals agree there are limitations to standardized testing and how much these tests actually reflect learning and development. Likewise we must acknowledge the limitations these tests offer in revealing the efficacy of master’s degrees.

There needs to be research into other educational outcomes—student creativity and critical thinking, the social atmosphere of the classroom, the ability of teachers to collaborate with each other, teacher skill in catering to specific needs of their class, student writing ability —and how advancing the education of teachers affects them.

And these do not simply constitute fluff categories of no real world significance. For example, I recently talked to a doctoral candidate in UC Berkeley’s Economics program who relayed that while his classes are full of students from Asian countries, few of these students go on to attain positions or excel at American universities as professors. He asserted it is because these students are handicapped by education emphases in their countries: they are excellent at mastering standardized tests and in performing discrete tasks. But they have never been trained in how to think creatively and take on new problems—critical to functioning as university researchers. On the other hand, American and European students who have been pushed by teachers to question conventional thinking and tackle new issues thrive.

A major purpose of a master’s degree is to instill the ability in teachers to move beyond bureaucratic checkmarks and engage students on a more innovative level. So as long as the criteria for judging the effect of advanced education for teachers is limited to myopic data points like standardized test scores, we will never be able to ascertain the true significance of this type of education.