Dunno, they all do it though. I know school stats report the % of teachers with higher degrees and of course they all want those percentages to be higher. Possibly there are state incentives. Mostly it's just a bunch of people doing dumb crap without anyone having the power & motivation to fix it so they can all knock it off, which is a pretty common phenomenon, actually.

[EDIT] I mean to you wanna be the superintendent reporting that proportion of district teachers with master's degrees is up by seven percent since you started, or the one explaining that most of those degrees are bullshit and you don't care about it and neither should anyone else? Bear in mind most people have zero idea what teacher education looks like.

Yup. NC recently got rid of the automatic pay bump for having a masters degree while simultaneously increasing base teacher pay and there was a huge uproar over it. Nobody wants to lose their boondoggle.

Teachers' master's degrees are, in effect, a way to divert money from (mostly) teachers and (a little bit, some places) school districts to universities for no actual benefit, so that's great. Hope they manage to keep it up and that spreads.

OTOH it'd be nice if there were still a way to reward teachers who'd done a real and relevant master's (which very few of them do now), but I don't think anyone's interested in nailing down that distinction. It's not even just degree mills, either, AFAIK the vast majority of postgraduate programs aimed at teachers are designed, primarily, to be pretty easy to pass and to have relatively low time commitments. They all want a piece of that action, and if they increase the rigor demand for their product will drop because a hypothetical very hard, non-bullshit teaching master's from a prestigious school brings the same pay bump as a very bullshit one from a third-rate state school.

> divert money from teachers and school districts to universities for no actual benefit, so that's great. Hope they manage to keep it up and that spreads.

I am hearing sarcasm, which I would wish to encourage in the US, but it is possibly out of place on HN.

So far New Orleans has been my favourite US location that seemed to have sarcasm as a culture (although I have sampled very little of the US).

I believe a portion of it ties into school accreditation.

Are you suggesting they dumb-down our educational system?! These are our children, our most important resource, we are talking about here!

You got hit with downvotes, but your (sarcastic) reaction is, as intended, spot on for the kind of thing no-one wants to risk hearing if they try to change the way higher degrees work in education. That the whole thing is an (expensive!) load of crap is 100% true, but that isn't widely known, I think, and trying to explain it's harder and riskier (for administrators & others with decision-making power) than just going along with the flow.