1/17 cnbpts
Opposing forces are driving school reform. One is pushing in the direction of more choice and competition: public school choice, charter schools and vouchers for schools; alternative certification or waivers for teachers.
The other wants to make the current system even more rigid than it already is: increase certification requirements, tighten the rules about who can be in what classroom, make people get master's degrees.
If four years of ed-school follies discourage talented people from entering teaching, make 'em take five years.
The choice is not between bad schools and good schools; there are always some of both. The choice is between bad schools children are stuck in and bad schools they and their parents can avoid.
One ploy to tighten the education establishment's chokehold on who may teach is so-called ''National Board Certification.'' The National Board for Professional Teacher Standards, a foundation-supported outfit in Michigan, for a $2,000 fee, puts teachers through a series of hoops and then gives them a certificate.
As of November, there were 1,835 board-certified teachers, including 43 in Colorado. About 6,800 applications are pending, a spokeswoman said, which is a threefold increase over last year. Almost half of applicants, 47 percent, earn their certificates on the first try, and they can redo any parts they don't pass.
Pause for a moment and follow the money. The NBPTS wants to certify more than 100,000 teachers, at least one in every school. That's $200 million, and the teachers unions and their allies are already lobbying for school districts to pay for certification, to give teachers paid time off for preparing for it and to pay them more after they get it.
In their vision, there'd be other perks, too; state-to-state license portability and first crack at special assignments.
The phrase ''board-certified'' is no doubt intended to evoke the medical image of highly qualified specialists with advanced training, but unlike medical boards, these are entirely voluntary.
Applicants are required to complete 10 exercises, which vary by the kind of certificate they want but typically include such things as lesson plans, videotapes of their teaching and a portfolio of their work. These exercises are evaluated according to fine-sounding but hopelessly imprecise propositions about the behavior of accomplished teachers - that they're committed to students, for instance, and that they learn from experience.
In pages and pages of boilerplate (use NBPTS for a Web search) the board attempts to describe its ideal of a board-certified teacher, but notably fails to demonstrate either that it can identify a teacher who lives up to the description or that the description identifies effective teaching.
What is clear, though, that candidates for certification must be very, very mindful of educational orthodoxy.
They're to develop ''students' cognitive capacity and their respect for learning'' but it's equally important ''to foster students' self-esteem, motivation, character, civic responsibility and their respect for individual, cultural, religious and racial differences.''
Candidates are supposed to recognize that ''what is considered intelligent behavior is largely determined by the values and beliefs of the culture'' and in the ed-school culture, that means devotion to the theories of Howard Gardner.
''Accomplished teachers know,'' the board assures us loftily, ''that old theories of a monolithic intelligence have given way to more complex theories of multiple intelligences. Current thinking no longer casts 'intelligence' as a context-free, one-dimensional trait.''
You wouldn't guess that this is still very much an open question, with psychologists not in agreement over whether ''linguistic, musical, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, personal'' abilities warrant the name ''intelligences,'' how they would be measured or what use the measurements would be in the classroom.
Teachers who are effective practitioners in a traditional style need not apply. ''Self-contained classrooms, whole-group, textbook-centered instruction, teaching as telling, learning as the passive acquisition of facts, standardized testing, - these patterns of schooling are as familiar as chalk dust,'' the board writes disparagingly.
Not that the acquisition of facts is passive, but the offhand assumption that it is helps justify teachers who believe ''abandoning speed and accuracy as the criterion of success'' in mathematics helps their students grow and who value assigning problems ''with multiple or no solutions.''
I heard Jaime Escalante talk once. He was mesmerizing, and his success teaching mathematics to at-risk students is legendary, but I bet his lesson plans and portfolio wouldn't earn him board-certified status with this bunch.
And I bet he wouldn't care.