In most states, teachers get automatic pay increases just by acquiring a master’s degree and in a few (New York among them) it is necessary for a teacher to achieve full licensure. As Marcus Winters writes here, though, those credentials do nothing to improve teaching ability. We waste scarce dollars subsidizing the part of the education establishment that dispenses these degrees.
I have heard teachers say that graduate coursework is often perfunctory and pointless, but even if it weren’t, taking more classes is not apt to improve a teacher’s ability to explain things to students. This is just another another of the innumerable ways in which government policy causes the misallocation of resources.