Halt Urged to Paying Teachers For Earning Master's Degrees

States spend millions of education dollars each year rewarding teachers for earning advanced degrees that show little correlation with improved student achievement, a recent analysis concludes.

The policy of giving teachers salary “bumps” after they earn master’s degrees in education “is in the drinking water everywhere, but we know the relationship between the degree and student achievement is nonexistent,” said Raegen Miller, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank.

Mr. Miller, a former union president in Palo Alto, Calif., co-wrote the policy brief—one in a series on school financing in the economic downturn—with Marguerite Roza, a professor at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at...