BAD NEWS FOR NATIONAL TEACHER CERTIFICATION

Saturday, October 5, 2002

***CORRECTION PUBLISHED OCT. 15, 2002 FOLLOWS: ***

Linda Seebach's column on Page 23B Oct. 5 should have attributed some information to a group of four scholars who reviewed research for the Education Commission of the States rather than to ECS President Ted Sanders.

[text has been corrected below, with inserted material in square brackets; the reviewers' report is at http://www.ecs.org/ecsmain.asp?page=/html/special/nbpts/letter.htm]

For all the hoopla about national board certification for teachers, it turns out to be mostly hoops for teachers to jump through.

The National Board for Professional Teacher Standards conducts an elaborate -- and expensive -- certification process, for which teachers pay a $2,300 application fee. They submit portfolios of their students' best work, videotapes of themselves teaching and written analyses of their classroom work. Those who pass, depending on where they teach, get salary increases amounting to thousands of dollars a year.

National board President Betty Castor has claimed that research gives parents, elected officials and policymakers ``the absolute highest confidence that national-board-certified teachers are providing students with a high-quality learning experience.'' The study Castor relied on, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, concluded that teachers who got their certificates were superior to those who applied (but didn't pass) on 11 of 13 measures the board considers important.

Student achievement, however, was not one of the 11. Earlier this year, J. E. Stone, of the College of Education at East Tennessee State University, examined the effectiveness of board-certified teachers in the light of Tennessee's value-added assessment system.

Stone's study was small, because Tennessee isn't all that keen on national certification anyway, and of the 40 or so teachers in the state who have earned certification, exactly 16 teach in grades three through eight, where value-added data are available. The standard for adequate progress is that every child makes a year's worth of academic progress in a school year. Excellent progress is 15 percent more than a year's worth, substandard is 15 percent less.

Considering their performance in three core subjects, math, reading and language, in each of three years, the 16 board-certified teachers taken as a group were just average, almost as likely to be below 85 percent as above 115.

Chattanooga, Tenn., uses as its criterion for outstanding teachers that they meet the standard for excellence in all three subjects for all three years. That's a tough standard, but some Chattanooga teachers have met it. No one in Stone's group did.

The board's reaction was predictable; it complained that Stone, who wrote for the Education Consumers Consultants Network (education-consumers.org on the Web) wasn't independent because he had previously criticized the board and its certification process. It was, it said, looking forward to the results of studies it had commissioned itself. Why those would be more independent, it did not say. Furthermore, the board said, the study was too small.

It is, to be sure, a very small group, though it includes everybody in Tennessee for whom data are available. If board-certified teachers are reliably, statistically superior in the only thing that matters, student achievement, how uniquely unlucky was Tennessee to get these 16? And, it's worth noting, the study on which Castor relied is not significantly larger, having included only 31 certified teachers.

The Education Commission of the States came to the board's defense, announcing that it had chosen several independent scholars to review Stone's study. But in summarizing their conclusions, commission President Ted Sanders has revealed how uncritically the commission views anything that favors board certification and how disinclined it is to accept well-founded criticism.

The reviewers noted that there haven't been many studies linking certification and student achievement. That reflects, [the reviewers say], ``the board's own approach to identifying excellent teachers -- examining their practices rather than the learning of their students.''

Yeah, but that's a problem.

[Reviewers explain] that board-certified teachers may focus less narrowly on student performance on the tests used in Tennessee than other teachers do, which is why ``their students may not perform as well as the students of other teachers.''

That's a problem too.

[] The reviewers would have liked more personal information about the teachers. But, as Stone also made clear, Tennessee law prohibits releasing any such information that could allow individuals to be identified.

No one need be surprised that the national board is digging in its heels to protect its very lucrative franchise. But why is the Education Commission of the States, supposedly an independent body, so eager to help out?