Very Different Views on National Board Certified Teachers


Certification costs taxpayers but doesn't rate teaching skill
Byline: MARSHA RICHARDS

The News Tribune; Published: Sunday, December 26, 2004
Edition: SOUTH SOUND Section:Editorial/Opinion Page: B19, Story Type: Local/State
Keywords: Opinion/Comment, Local/State, Column, Viewpoint

With trumpets blaring, Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson recently announced that 235 Washington teachers joined 346 of their colleagues this year in becoming National Board Certified. This
distinction earns these 581 teachers a $3,500 annual salary bonus and other benefits.

For the sake of the teachers who have invested months of their lives earning this certification, the taxpayers who spend millions each year underwriting the endeavor and the students relying on our public schools for quality education, I wish I could say the program offers some academic value. Unfortunately, it's little more than a fancy label, slickly marketed by an organization that stands to collect $2,300 in fees for every teacher who applies.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) was formed in 1987 for the stated purpose of advancing "the quality of teaching and learning." In the 17 years since, despite investments of more than $350 million from state and federal government and private contributors, there is
no evidence to show it has a positive impact on student achievement. That's not to say the NBPTS hasn't funded studies to proclaim its own value. In fact, the board has commissioned 22 studies for publication in 2005 after heavy criticism about a lack of documentation to prove the worth of its program.

In the handful of studies the NBPTS currently claims as justification for its existence, only one is actually independent (i.e., not funded by the board or written by someone with close ties to the board). Bankrolled by the Department of Education and published by the Urban Institute and the University of Washington in April 2004, its conclusions are hardly glowing.

Among them, and I quote:

"There is a dearth of evidence relating NBPTS-certification to a direct measure of teacher effectiveness: student outcomes."

"Given educational resource constraints and the size of the local, state and national investment in NBPTS, policy-makers have reason to be concerned about whether NBPTS certification is in fact an effective indicator of teacher quality."

"In both reading and math, we still find that teachers who will eventually be certified are more effective prior to certification, and certified teachers are more effective than noncertified applicants, but no
more effective than non-applicants."

NBPTS officials aren't quoting those findings. Instead, they point out that the Urban Institute study gives the board credit for being able to identify (not develop) teachers who "contribute to relatively larger
student learning gains." (There are much less expensive ways to do this.) Further, instead of reporting the actual "student learning gains" identified by the study, NBPTS officials turn them into percentages that give no point of reference. Never mind that the real difference between the math scores for students of board-certified and noncertified teachers was less than half of one point, and that the Urban Institute qualifies even these small gains by saying: "Some of these differences in test scores may be explained by factors other than the certification status of teachers."

The board's response to this highly cautious rhetoric is highly inflated rhetoric. The study, it claims, confirms that "National Board Certification is the gold standard in teaching." Hardly. The board's rhetoric becomes inflammatory when officials defend against other independent studies and reports that show the standards and "performance-based assessments" required to achieve certification are highlysubjective and lacking in academic substance. While teachers must submit a detailed portfolio, they are not required to show the effect of their teaching on student academic achievement. While poorly designed, the National Board Certification program is expertly marketed. Every state in the nation now offers incentives for teachers who complete it. In Washington, annual bonuses alone for 581 certified teachers cost more than $2 million. And these costs will go up:

Bergeson boasted recently that 500 more teachers are vying for certification in 2005. Rewarding excellent teachers with higher pay is a great idea. But rewards need to be given to teachers who demonstrate their ability to achieve the outcome we desire from our public schools: measurable, increased student achievement. To measure this objectively, we should use value-added assessments, which are just what their name implies: a measure of academic achievement that quantifies how much value a student received from one year of teaching. The Urban Institute study used data gathered from this type of assessment to evaluate and compare board-certified teachers. Which begs the question: If we can identify quality teachers with the much simpler value-added model, why spend hundreds of millions on NBPTS? Why indeed?
- - -
Marsha Richards directs the Education Reform Center for the Evergreen
Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based research organization dedicated to
individual liberty, free enterprise and accountable government.

We should wish all our teachers were board-certified

ELIZABETH DUFFEY
The News Tribune; Published, Sunday January 9, 2005
Section: Columnists

I am proud to be one of Washington's 581 National Board Certified teachers. Whenever a special interest group such as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation promotes an agenda (Viewpoint, 12-26) that does not
have the welfare of our students at heart, I feel compelled to respond. My only agenda is to promote the honorable profession of teaching and to make sure that our students come first in all decisions about education.

Marsha Richards, director of EFF's Education Reform Center, disputes the effectiveness of national board certification. "I wish I could say the program offers some academic value," she writes.

Her definition of value in education is what she calls value-added assessment, "a measure of academic achievement that quantifies how much value a student received from one year of teaching." If only it were that easy to objectify the art of teaching.

If straight student achievement is the measure of my effectiveness as a teacher, I want to make sure that I position myself in a school populated with students who have English as their first language, are
predominantly white, do not have learning disabilities of any kind, are not developmentally challenged and do not exhibit any kind of brain dysfunction.

None of my students may be behaviorally disordered or mentally ill. All of them must have high socioeconomic status, come from two-parent homes where education is highly valued, stay at one school for the entire school year and attend school on a regular basis. Oh, yeah, and none is drug-impaired, dealing with issues of sexual identity or bullied by other students.

The reality is that Washington's teachers deal with most or all of these issues every day. I have the greatest admiration for my colleagues in special education who daily work with students who hold the least promise of doing well on standardized tests, and those who work in alternative education with the students who don't fit in regular schools.

Quantifiable success for them is sometimes having a student show up daily and remain in a safe place for a few hours. These folks would be on the bottom of the merit pay scale because their kids achieve the least (at least by any paper measure I've seen), yet they are among the best teachers I know.

If you want to know who the effective teachers are, ask parents, ask students, ask administrators and ask teacher colleagues. We all know. Teachers have very different styles, but in general, all great teachers have these traits in common:

* They are committed to students and their learning.

* They know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects.

* They are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning.

* They think systematically about their practice and learn from experience.

* They are members of learning communities.

These qualities are the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards Five Core Propositions. Any teacher who achieves National Board Certification must present "clear and convincing" evidence that he
or she has met these standards. The process is rigorous, daunting, time-consuming (200 to 400 hours), expensive and possibly humiliating.

Our reward from the state is a yearly $3,500 bonus, on which we pay taxes. No teacher teaches, or attempts certification, for the money. We do it for the loftiest of reasons: because we want to challenge
ourselves, because we want to be better teachers, because we wish to serve our students better, because we wish to be leaders in our field, because we wish to bring honor to the profession. Only a cynic would say otherwise.

Once a teacher has achieved certification, a district can be darn sure it has a top-notch teacher in that person, regardless of what his or her students are able to demonstrate in a pen-and-paper test.

According to Richards, paying out $2 million to reward board-certified teachers is a waste of taxpayer money. I adamantly disagree. Richards bemoans the fact that 500 more Washington teachers are attempting certification this year, as if that were a bad thing.

I know what every school district knows: National Board Certified teachers are the ones you want your children to have. They bring leadership and idealism to every district that is lucky enough to have
them.

I'd love to see every teacher in the state strive to become a National Board Certified teacher. Our students would be the luckiest students in the nation. Washington is making a wise investment in rewarding the highest standards in teaching.

Elizabeth Duffey of Gig Harbor teaches English at Peninsula High School.
She has taught for 32 years.