Teacher Voice on Master's Degrees

AFTie Ed responds to the posts below on Master's degrees, just after I chided union blogs for non-responsiveness. My bad. His arguments, as near as I can tell, are as follows:

1) Unions like the AFT are supporting progams right now in places like New Mexico that expand the kinds of professional development for which teachers can receive salary increases beyond Master's degrees.

Good point, that's certainly true.

2) "The purpose of the Master’s degree is to provide a teacher with appropriate professional development. The effort to achieve this development and the results from it are what justify the increase in compensation that teachers typically accrue from it."

Ed doesn't dispute the research findings that there are no "results" from Master's degrees (although he only concedes that the degrees are "imperfect"). So all we're left with is rewarding teachers for "effort"--even though it's wasted effort. If that's the policy, why not at least let teachers themselves decide what kind of unrelated-to-effectiveness-in-the-classroom activity we're going to pay them for? Running a marathon takes a lot of effort (and less money out of pocket), why not give them a permanent salary bump for that? What's the difference?

3) "it’s just a good idea to try to link pay to professional development."

Even professional development that doesn't work?

4) Questions like that are the equivalent of "when did you stop beating your wife?"

Well, that sort of depends--and let me stress that Ed put this metaphor on the table, not me--on whether you are beating your wife, doesn't it?

5) Reallocating money currently being squandered on Master's degrees for better purposes would be a "tremendous political trap."

Huh? Why? Seriously, what are the political pitfalls here? It would be good for everbody except for ineffective graduate education programs, and last I checked they don't have some kind of wealthy PAC (although that would be sort of fun) or bigfoot lobbying organization. Help me understand.

Update 1: Sherman Dorn responds here, and makes the point that education schools ain't exactly thrilled about teaching students who don't want to be there. Fair point. It's also worth noting that education schools don't get to keep all that money that pours in from in-service teachers. Ed schools are the financial breadbasket for a lot of universities, taking in large amounts of revenue that then gets distributed elsewhere in the university. At one point, both of my parents were teaching at a public university, one in the computer science department, the other in the school of education. One of them taught twice as many classes as the other and got paid half as much. Any guess which was which?

Update 2: In an update to his previous post, Ed says I'm quoting him out of context, because what he really meant was...actually, he doesn't explain that. Okay, I'm happy to let readers draw their own conclusions on this one.