A recent study of the results of teacher certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, written by Dan Goldhaber and Emily Anthony, has generated a lot of cheering in the state. Gov. Mike Easley, for example, put out a press release saying, “This study reaffirms my belief in National Board Certification for our teachers, scientifically proving the success we have already seen in our schools.”
Since North Carolina spends more than $30 million per year subsidizing NBPTS, the governor is eager to call it successful.
Let’s hold off on the cheering. A careful reading of the study shows that it gives only slight praise for the program as a means of identifying those who are better teachers. It doesn’t conclude that the NBPTS program actually causes teachers to improve, and also questions its cost-effectiveness.
Goldhaber and Anthony studied student test results in 1996-‘99 for third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders, looking at the pupils’ progress in reading and math. What Goldhaber and Anthony found was a small but statistically significant correlation between student results and having been taught by an NBCT-certified teacher. On average, that is, students taught by an NBCT improved somewhat more than did students taught by teachers who had not attempted to obtain that certification, or who had tried and failed.
But does that indicate that the NBPTS process causes teachers to become more proficient? Goldhaber and Anthony don’t believe so. Their paper states, “Going through the NBPTS certification process does not appear to make teachers more effective.” In other words, the costly and time-consuming certification helps to identify teachers who are already better than average, but not to improve those who aren’t.
That conclusion should cause shudders at NBPTS, which makes much ado about its supposedly rigorous teaching standards and leads people to believe that it has laid out the true path to becoming a master teacher. But its standards consist of about equal parts of ideas that are elementary common sense and ideas that call for “progressive” teaching methods. Someone might be a superb teacher without ever having read through them.
Furthermore, the NBPTS process of certifying some teachers and not others is shaky. It is not, as Easley’s release says, “an extensive series of performance-based assessments.” What it entails is the creation of a videotape showing the teacher at work (carefully staged by the teacher), the submission of several “portfolios” with some examples of student work and “reflective commentary” by the teacher, and the writing of several essays. All of that is subjectively graded by other teachers. How much students actually learn from the teacher is irrelevant to the process.
One Atlanta-area high school teacher who obtained certification wrote in the Atlanta Journal/Constitution last year, “Though picky and frustrating, the national certification process is not as difficult as people claim it is. More important, I doubt it is going to improve student achievement.” Rather than looking for solid evidence of teaching excellence, he said, it’s “really a process where teachers tell the Board what it wants to hear.”
Knowing one’s subject very well is a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for excellent teaching. However, teachers aren’t required to pass a rigorous subject-matter exam in order to qualify for certification. Some content knowledge is worked into the essays, but that’s a far cry from having to demonstrate widespread knowledge of history, English, biology, or whatever the teacher’s particular field is.
While Goldhaber’s study finds that on average students who have certified teachers progress a little faster, he acknowledges that there are many cases where those teachers produced only average or even below-average results. Therefore, NBPTS certification isn’t even a very reliable indicator of teaching excellence. Some mediocre teachers get certification, while some excellent ones don’t.
Given the high cost of paying for the NBPTS process — $2,300 per teacher — Goldhaber says, “Whether there might be other ways to identify highly effective teachers is another particularly important policy question.” What we need is a method for reliably identifying our best teachers for as little cost as possible. NBPTS certification is not reliable and it’s quite costly.
Rather than proving the value of the state’s spending to promote NBPTS certification, the Goldhaber/Anthony study asks some probing questions about it. Our public officials need to take another look at this costly program.
