Tom Shurford reports that the average combined verbal/quant GRE score of an applicant for graduate school in Education Administration is 949 (429 verbal [youch!], 520 quantitative). This was lower than every field for which data was collected except for Home Economics, Social Work, Counseling and Special Education.
Some might suggest that this means we have a cultural problem (we don't respect teaching enough) or a compensation problem (we don't pay educators enough). I rather think this merely suggests that education administration, rather like home economics, isn't a real bl**dy discipline, and one probably shouldn't be able to get a master's degree in it.
This is, of course, coming from someone who studies "public policy," which isn't a real discipline either. But hey, we need to at least develop some basic competence in economics, political science and moral philosophy to do our jobs well, and the demand for graduates of policy programs is at least somewhat market driven.
Degrees in education administration, on the other hand, exist primarily because union pay scales mandate substantial pay premiums for educators possessed of graduate degrees even when these degrees are utterly useless. Demanding and compensating teachers who can scrape through, say a master's in math would yield far better results. But current union activists can't allow that. As you can see, they can't get into harder programs, and must therefore stymie changes that'd pull in a sharper crop of youngsters.
Posted by Marie Gryphon on July 27, 2005