No! Not a Master's in Education!

If you're thinking about acquiring a Master's degree in education, please allow me to discourage that thought.  Outside of K-12 public education, it will be completely worthless.  Inside K-12 public education, it will only get you a modest pay raise, and it will be unlikely to make you a better teacher.

I acquired mine back in 1992.  The focus for my degree was on how technology could assist in education.  Back then, I owned a Macintosh LC.  It had a 15 MHz CPU, 2 whole MB (that's MB, not GB) RAM, and a 40 MB (not GB) hard drive.

How relevant do you think that degree would be for today's educational needs?  Yeah.  The only thing that piece of paper shows is that I was able to read a lot of papers about other people's thinking on education, and generate my own thinking in another paper.  I don't know how many people ever read my field project write up, outside my advisor and perhaps the other two educators who were on my field project committee.  I don't think any of them would remember it.

It did have the effect of turning my head around 180 degrees about the uses of technology in education.  I went in thinking I would be studying how to write some outstanding software in education, and I wanted to do that.  I came out the other end certain that couldn't be done, no matter how wonderful the technology.  I have yet to be proven wrong.  Computers and software do not teach.  Distance learning is for a very few people.  Computers and technology are tools in the hands of good educators, they are no substitute for a good educator.

That was a fair bit of funds down the tube to show it couldn't be done.  I don't mind spending money to eliminate possibilities, but this degree did not give me a marketable skill.

Education is like that.  From the undergraduate to the doctorate level, we study the latest fads in education, educational theory, current problems in education, current trends in education.  We can tell you about Bloom's Taxonomy, multiple intelligences, group learning and grading, cycles of learning, direct instruction, the Platonic model, internalizing education, authentic assessment, standardized assessment, diversity, minority education, ESL, theory about teaching reading via phonics, whole word, and whole language, John Dewey,  Montessori, Piaget, Vigotsky, etc. etc.  

My degree was in 1992.  If you've worked on one since then, and recognize almost none of these topics, then I have made my case.  Education as a field of study has no body of knowledge that is its foundation.

You won't have a marketable skill in any field outside of education.  Your Master's degree in education may not even be any good at the local community college, because they are more and more requiring that degree to be in the field that you are teaching.  I'm grandfathered in.  For now.  That may change.

So if you need a Master's degree, get something in a real field, like a foreign language, or literature, or engineering or biology or math.  You'll have more to teach when you return to the classroom, rather than some squishy theories about how we learn and some techniques to control crowds of students.