Garden State education Commissioner Lucille Davy recently launched plans to crack down on diploma mills by requiring that educators earn their advanced degrees from accredited institutions only. The proposal comes on the heels of a controversy involving school administrators found to have earned their master?s degrees via unaccredited online universities. Not only does the credential provide a pay bump, but the tuition charged for the degrees comes essentially gratis, courtesy of the local school districts.

The pervasiveness of low caliber degrees in education extends far beyond what's available on the internet. The national accreditation movement spurred by NCATE and intended to raise the caliber of the nation's 1,200 disparate ed schools has yet to offer much of a return to the many states that require their institutions to earn the NCATE sticker. We know from studies on the math and reading preparation of teachers, as well as Arthur Levine, that NCATE accreditation doesn?t necessarily signal the quality of an ed school.

In New Jersey's move against online diploma mills, it is unlikely that the states' campus-based ed schools were watching from the sidelines. More likely, they loaded the ammunition so that Davy could take aim and fire. In spite of the fact that bad ed schools tarnish the reputation of all ed schools, a similarly aggressive move towards those schools won?t be forthcoming.