RALEIGH – The General Assembly will convene Wednesday for an historic session – a special “veto session” called by Gov. Mike Easley in compliance with the state constitution’s recent provisions creating the gubernatorial veto. If the underlying issue, teacher certification, hadn’t been important in its own right, the circumstances would still have made the session important. Only six bills have ever been vetoed in North Carolina, which was the last state to give its governors the power. None has been overridden.
The teacher-certification bill could well have been the first. The bill, which suspended some teacher-testing requirements and allowed teachers obtaining “highly qualified” status in other states to retain it in North Carolina, passed the state legislature this year by an overwhelming, veto-proof majority. Superintendents and school boards across the state strongly supported it, too, having agitated for years for relief from licensure rules that made it hard to fill vacancies in fast-growing districts.
But the Easley administration didn’t agree. The governor worried aloud that allowing reciprocity in teacher certification would yank North Carolina’s standards down to that of the lowest common denominator among the 50 states. The state’s largest teacher union, the North Carolina Association of Educators, also opposed the bill. Unions usually press for strict licensing standards, to exclude competition, and this was no exception. After all, if existing teachers in NCAE had to jump through all these hoops, regardless of how pointless the exercise may be, why shouldn’t newcomers have to do the same?
Because, says my colleague Terry Stoops in a new John Locke Foundation briefing paper, there is no compelling evidence that the kind of certification standards used in North Carolina have any real relationship to improving student outcomes. While testing teachers on the subject matter they are planning to teach is an improvement over testing them on educational theory, it is not necessarily the most efficient means of discovering quality.
North Carolina has a history of frittering away large sums of taxpayers’ money on teacher-quality initiatives that lack an evidentiary basis. For example, the state pays significant bonuses to teachers obtaining graduate degrees and to those obtaining national board certification. Neither is a successful means of identifying and retaining highly effective teachers.
As for the ABCs of Public Education, the centerpiece of North Carolina’s mid-1990s wave of school reform, it created the appearance of a merit-pay system without the underlying architecture. Schools, not individual teachers, earn bonuses based on whether students meet or exceed growth targets on standardized tests. It’s far too easy to get the bonuses, the bar having been set too low, and the bonuses are relatively small. It would be far better to give big bonuses to a few superior teachers who take on difficult assignments or deliver truly exemplary performance. Contrary to what some assert, there is scant evidence that the ABCs program raised student performance in North Carolina: passing percentages (on our too-easy tests) rose at about the same annual rate before 1995 as after.
The 2005 legislation reforming teacher certification was a modest step forward, and the governor’s veto richly deserved to be overridden. But apparently not wanting to give Easley a public black eye, legislative leaders have instead decided to form a committee to fashion a compromise.
Oh, well. Wednesday’s session is a missed opportunity but will still be historic.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.