RALEIGH – Here’s an easy way to save state taxpayers more than $25 million a year: take to heart the latest study released in favor of the expenditure. It’s that underwhelming.
I’m talking about our old friend, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Founded in part by former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, the national teacher unions, and various other members of the education establishment, the group offers board certification for teachers who agree to go through its vetting and approval process. With the state paying the cost and dangling a significant salary hike for those obtaining it – that’s where the $25 million-plus annual cost comes in – national board certification is supposed to help retain excellent teachers in the classroom and thus increase student achievement.
As my Carolina Journal colleagues and I have written in the past, early evidence for the success of national board certification has been sparse. The problem has been that it was not obvious the financial inducements were truly being targeted to the teachers we most needed to retain in the school system – those teachers, in other words, who were truly skilled at helping students learn, particularly students with significant personal or socioeconomic challenges to overcome. If the certification process wasn’t identifying such a teaching pool, if it was merely a credentialing system for ordinary teachers unlikely to leave in the first place, then it would merely be another, rather convoluted way to shovel more tax money into the profession. If, on the other hand, it could be shown that teachers obtaining board certification were significantly different from the rest of the workforce in the value they added in the classroom, board certification might make sense as a merit-based pay supplement.
Previous research was either not impressive or poorly designed, the latter consisting of various pieces of information linking board-certified teachers to all sorts of variables other than the one policymakers should care about: boosts in student achievement. Now, researchers at Arizona State University have looked at test scores of students taught by 35 board-certified teachers in Arizona and compared them with the performance of other students. As reported in School Reform News, the study found that in about one-third of the 48 comparisons, students taught by board-certified teachers scored higher than the control group.
The study’s authors certainly thought their findings were a big deal. In the paper, they actually took the opportunity to attack previous studies questioning the cost-effectiveness of the program. But a closer examination of what the ASU researchers found suggests that if theirs is the best-case scenario for board certification, it shouldn’t be hard for open-minded policymakers to pull the plug.
You see, the gains in the board-certification classrooms were the equivalent of one month of progress. That’s all. And according to other researchers, the study likely failed to assemble a true control group to factor out the effects of student background on the one hand or the self-selected nature of board-certified teachers on the other, so the gain could actually be less than a month’s worth. Sorry – that’s too small to be excited about. I am sure that the North Carolina General Assembly can find better ways to spend $25 million of our tax money.
Wait, did I just write that sentence? Let’s at least stop wasting the $25 million on board certification, and hope that the next wasteful project legislators come up with will cost us at least a little less.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.