This title is satire.

For the average sane person spending countless hours watching whales may be nice, romantic and even a spiritual act; but few of us would say that it leads to an improvement in teaching ability. But those “few of us” are not state bureaucrats, alas.

But whale watching is actually deemed by some state bureaucrats to be an in effort in bettering one’s teaching abilities. And not only whale watching.

Most states offer a huge salary increase if a teacher earners a masters degree. In fact, Washington state leads the nation with a salary boost of $10,777 for a masters degree. That is an enormous incentive to obtain a degree for anyone - people are “greedy, greedy, greedy” as my econ prof. says - but even more so for less than mean income teachers.

These salary increases would be justified for the tax payers if teachers were actually investing a lot of effort in obtaining degrees that would make them demonstrable better teachers. For instance, if a history teacher eanred a masters in U.S. History we could reasonable assume that she is not able to better educate his/her students on history for the teacher has studied the topic more. But very often those earning masters degrees do not earn them in a specific field of study, but, rather, a general masters in education.

What does this mean? Well, depending on the state and college many teachers are able to earn credit toward the attainment of their masters through...whale watching. Not kidding; a personal account from a Cato scholar:

Years ago, talking with a public school teacher friend of mine at the end of the school year, she told me how excited she was about her impending orca whale watching outings in the San Juan Islands. Not only would it be a blast, but it would count as a continuing education credit (toward a master’s of education degree, as I recall) that would boost her salary substantially.

Normally, I bite my tongue in such situations. But before I could stop myself I blurted out the question: “Is watching whales going to make you a better teacher?”

A new study from the liberal think tank Center for American Progress outlines this phenomena of rewarding teachers with higher salaries for dubious degrees.