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.
All things considered, it's much better than it's made out to be.
Teaching is pretty stable, offers pensions, unionized, yearly adjusted for CPI, opportunities to increase pay schedule + extra pay with extra curriculars / duties, lots of time off, good hours.
Don't get me wrong. There are issues and it does depend on the district (US).
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.
"The industry", at least at a pre-university level, is entirely at the mercy of state and local governments for its budgets.
If you want schools to pay their teachers more, you have to push for higher taxes, because that's where the money for them comes from. And you have to explain to your families and friends that yes, the extra $30.45 they had to pay this year is very, very meaningful, because it lets starting teachers make enough to actually afford rent, food, and clothes all in the same year. (You probably have to explain that part ad nauseam.)
Those who produce the materials teachers teach should have advanced degrees. Teachers should have degrees demonstrating their competence in accessing and relating to such knowledge.
It's funny that this is a question when every college STEM class is taught by people who have degrees that have absolutely nothing to do with being able to teach effectively.
No job "needs advanced degrees". They need experience.
If you want to get your foot in the door in a competitive market, degrees help. They offer some substitute for experience. But it's ridiculous to require them.
Such a ridiculous framing. Of course a teacher needs to provably know their subject, along with a solid practicum and a dollop of teaching theory, because, as with teaching oneself piano, bad teaching habits get engrained easily.
That said, some subjects are more difficult than others to teach, and thus require better education.
A friend who came from a wealthy family went to an Ivy League teaching school. While she was there, her family went bankrupt and she had to take on student loans. Fast forward to today, she regrets going there, saying a cheap state school would have been just as effective for her career.
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.
> Have you never met a bad doctor? A shoddy lawyer? A barista with a PhD?
I presume the implication is that bad doctors and shoddy lawyers exist and just because they have advanced degrees doesn't make them good at what they do. This seems reasonable.
BUT, I find it fascinating that people who aren't doctors or medical experts think they can spot a "bad" doctor or people who aren't lawyers or experts in law think they can spot a "shoddy" lawyer.
A good doctor/lawyer makes good decisions and executes beneficial actions given the facts surrounding a situation. It's pretty hard to judge whether those decisions and actions are good or bad if one isn't an expert.
That's a huge motivating factor for professional licenses.
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.
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.
Sorta related: I've often wondered why teachers have to pay for their own training, yet police and fire fighters have their training paid for by tax payers. They both provide a valuable public service. IMHO, teachers should be hired, then trained - paid for by the state, just like police and fire fighters usually are.
Teacher experience means they have more say in their students. It's common for new teachers to be shoved into the worst schools and classes in the district. Teacher performance doesn't significantly effect student performance. Student ability and home situation are the best predictors. There are exceptionally bad and good teachers, but they are exactly that... exceptions.
Warning: this article is NOT advocating against teacher credentials! It's arguing educating children with inferior genes is useless anyway.
So can we please keep in mind WHO this guy is making this "argument"? He SELF identifies as a Nazi. And not like the people who constantly get accused of being a Nazi. I do not mean he's anti-immigrant or something like that. This guy is a full-blown actual Nazi. This guy is proud of holding the most despicable of Nazi viewpoints such as eugenics.
And just so we're clear about what HE means by eugenics: he means massacring people with inferior genes (and obviously, like all Nazi's for some reason ... starting with Jews). He wants, for example, black people to be massacred in the US, in part because of the argument made in this post. He does not believe you can train someone with "bad" genes to be smart (look at the graph at the bottom, even in this article he's making the point that education does not matter, only coming from a "good" family does)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] threadIs a good idea to select the people who hate teaching to become teachers?
Teaching is pretty stable, offers pensions, unionized, yearly adjusted for CPI, opportunities to increase pay schedule + extra pay with extra curriculars / duties, lots of time off, good hours.
Don't get me wrong. There are issues and it does depend on the district (US).
Now the aides..
If you want schools to pay their teachers more, you have to push for higher taxes, because that's where the money for them comes from. And you have to explain to your families and friends that yes, the extra $30.45 they had to pay this year is very, very meaningful, because it lets starting teachers make enough to actually afford rent, food, and clothes all in the same year. (You probably have to explain that part ad nauseam.)
If you want to get your foot in the door in a competitive market, degrees help. They offer some substitute for experience. But it's ridiculous to require them.
That said, some subjects are more difficult than others to teach, and thus require better education.
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 topical masters degree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker
I presume the implication is that bad doctors and shoddy lawyers exist and just because they have advanced degrees doesn't make them good at what they do. This seems reasonable.
BUT, I find it fascinating that people who aren't doctors or medical experts think they can spot a "bad" doctor or people who aren't lawyers or experts in law think they can spot a "shoddy" lawyer.
A good doctor/lawyer makes good decisions and executes beneficial actions given the facts surrounding a situation. It's pretty hard to judge whether those decisions and actions are good or bad if one isn't an expert.
That's a huge motivating factor for professional licenses.
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.
So can we please keep in mind WHO this guy is making this "argument"? He SELF identifies as a Nazi. And not like the people who constantly get accused of being a Nazi. I do not mean he's anti-immigrant or something like that. This guy is a full-blown actual Nazi. This guy is proud of holding the most despicable of Nazi viewpoints such as eugenics.
And just so we're clear about what HE means by eugenics: he means massacring people with inferior genes (and obviously, like all Nazi's for some reason ... starting with Jews). He wants, for example, black people to be massacred in the US, in part because of the argument made in this post. He does not believe you can train someone with "bad" genes to be smart (look at the graph at the bottom, even in this article he's making the point that education does not matter, only coming from a "good" family does)
Crémieux Recueil is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker
And no, this is not Godwin's law. There are (still) actual Nazi's. Really. This guy is one of them.