[Mountain_Skies]

My guess from what I've seen over the past three decades is that this started because private schools and some public schools in wealthy areas were touting how many of their teachers had master's degrees. Other school systems wanted to compete, so they started offering higher salaries to teachers if they had a master's degree. Soon it became very common for most teachers to have one. Amongst the teachers I know, most have master's degrees from the University of Phoenix because apparently it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to get that credential.

Back when this started, much of the alure of teachers with master's degrees was that they were highly educated in the subject matter they were teaching. It was implied that the chemistry teacher would have an MS in Chemistry. But now all the teachers I know have their MA in either Elementary Education or Secondary Education but none of them are teaching how to be teachers. It's a strange situation and recently one of them was ranting about the pay difference between having a master's degree and just a bachelor's degree had shrunk to nearly nothing. This is probably because the MA in Education has become so ubiquitous that it has little value. What school brags about the percentage of teachers with a master's degree anymore now that almost every school is over 80%-90%?