March/April 2002

Putting National Board Certification to the Test

By David T. Gordon

In February 1997, David Lustick was itching for a challenge. He had earned a master's degree in education and taught high school chemistry in New York City for four years. Now he was in São Paolo, Brazil, teaching at the American School. It was after midnight, and Lustick was watching President Bill Clinton's State of the Union speech on television. "To have the best schools, we must have the best teachers," the president said as he endorsed the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS).

Clinton noted that just 500 of the nation's three million teachers had been certified by NBPTS as accomplished veteran teachers since 1994, the first year of credentialing. He asked Congress to provide the resources to encourage 100,000 teachers to become National Board certified in the coming years. "We should reward and recognize our best teachers. And as we reward them, we should quickly and fairly remove those few who don't measure up, and we should challenge more of our finest young people to consider teaching as a career."

That was the first time David Lustick heard of National Board certification. The idea grabbed him: "I felt that my practice was unrecognized. This was a way to distinguish myself and improve my marketability for future positions." Later that year, Lustick paid the $2,000-plus fee out of his own pocket and began the process of getting National Board certification to teach high school science.

During the next seven months he prepared a 140-page portfolio of essays, sample lessons, and student work aimed at demonstrating his ability to plan lessons, teach strategies of scientific inquiry, and lead productive classroom discussions. Added to the portfolio were two 20-minute videos of Lustick at work in the classroom. Finally, he flew to Miami for an all-day test of his science knowledge through six written exercises.

Fewer than half of that year's applicants succeeded; Lustick was among them. It turned out to be a highlight of his young career--a rich professional development experience that increased his understanding of his own strengths and weaknesses as well as his confidence. "I felt much more empowered both as a teacher and as an individual. The process really forced me to stop and look at my work, to think about my performance in the classroom, to consider how students might experience my lessons--something I took for granted--and to ask, 'Is this really the best I can do?'" he says.

Since 1987, 44 states and 280 school districts have invested tens of millions of dollars to encourage teachers to try for Board certification. By the end of 2001, 16,037 teachers were National Board certified in 19 areas ranging from Early Childhood/Generalist to Adolescence and Young Adult/Mathematics. This year, 20,202 teachers have applied for certification. Based on 2001 results, more than half will succeed at the end of the 10-month process, for a total of more than 26,000 teachers--a long stride toward the Board's mark of certifying 100,000 teachers by 2006.

Why the increasing interest? Some teachers, like Lustick, do it for the challenge and enhanced prestige. Others respond to financial incentives such as bonuses and better pay. Still others expect to use the credential as a springboard to leadership positions within the teacher ranks. For most candidates, the draw is probably a combination of all three incentives.

Although just one-half of one percent of the nation's teachers are certified, their influence is greater than the numbers suggest. For one thing, they are helping to shape an emerging consensus among education professionals about what defines teacher quality. For another, they comprise a powerful constituency of professionals who demonstrate an ability and willingness to articulate those standards to their colleagues. Ninety-three percent of candidates--both successful and unsuccessful--say they believe the Board certification process has made them better teachers. Almost as many say the process taught them to create stronger curricula (89%) and improved their ability to evaluate student learning (89%).

Like most school reform efforts of the past two decades, the program began in the wake of "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 federal report that decried the state of U.S. schools. As a result, the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy put together its Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. Its 1987 report, "A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century," suggested creating a voluntary system of national certification comparable to the medical profession's licensing procedures.

With the financial backing of Carnegie and other foundations, the major teachers unions, and the U.S. Department of Education, the NBPTS was launched as a private, nonprofit organization led by an all-star roster of advisors from the fields of policy, research, and practice. Drafting comprehensive, research-based standards and assessments took almost five years. The result was a widely praised credentialing system with broad support in the ranks of education professionals. Indeed, two major licensing bodies for graduates of teacher-education programs--the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC)--have aligned their standards with the National Board's.

The Board has helped spark a national conversation among teachers about what constitutes good practice, an effort that aims to let teachers take control and "own" the discussion about teaching standards. To get certified, teachers must be able to explain and demonstrate their classroom practices--via ten written entries and two classroom videos--in a way that satisfies the expectations of scorers in the national office.

"This [process] has given teachers a structured environment in which to develop and use a vocabulary of good practice," says Jill Harrison Berg, a Board-certified humanities teacher from Cambridge, MA. "The process is really an intensive professional development exercise. It requires teachers to explain the choices they make in their practice--and that means they have to learn to be articulate about teaching."

Yet for all its positive reviews, both supporters and skeptics of Board certification are pressing for answers to tough questions. Do students learn more in classes taught by Board-certified teachers? Do low-performing schools benefit in any measurable way? Why do the passing rates of minority NBPTS candidates trail those of whites by wide margins? Is the assessment biased against teachers who employ more traditional, teacher-centered instructional methods? In other words, has the $200 million investment of charitable and taxpayer funds in this credentialing system been worthwhile?

The Board isn't shying away from these and other issues. In fact, it recently brought more than 200 scholars to Chicago to discuss what research would not only address the concerns of critics but improve the process. At the conference, NBPTS officials invited proposals from all quarters of the education research community and pledged to raise millions of dollars to fund new studies. Once the studies are underway, says NBPTS director of research and information Ann Harman, the Board will step back and let the evidence speak for itself--regardless of the results.

One study already completed supports the contention that Board-certified teachers are more capable, on average, than those who aren't--at least as measured by NBPTS criteria. Researchers, led by Lloyd Bond of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, compared the practice of 31 teachers who have won certification with that of 34 teachers who failed the process. They observed each teacher in class for about 75 hours, interviewed both teachers and students, and examined lesson plans. In addition, four students from each class were randomly asked to submit samples of their work for evaluation. All 65 teachers--drawn from North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington, DC--had similar education and experience.

"The differences we observed were pervasive, compelling, and consistent," the researchers wrote. National Board-certified teachers did a better job in 11 of 13 categories, including improvising and adapting lessons as situations dictate, critiquing their own performance, articulating high standards, designing lessons aligned to those standards, and showing a deep knowledge of their subject. They showed more enthusiasm for teaching, and in two categories--understanding verbal and nonverbal responses of children, and offering feedback to students--the Board-certified teachers also performed better, but not by statistically significant margins.

Better Educations?

Critics noted, however, that the students' academic performance got little or no consideration in the Bond study. National Board officials hope a new study of North Carolina's Board-certified teachers can find a concrete link between Board certification and improved student learning. William P. Sanders, head of assessment services for SAS in School, a North Carolina-based research and development firm, will apply his "value-added" method in examining the work of Board-certified teachers in North Carolina.

The purpose of value-added assessment is to quantify in a concrete way the impact that teachers have on their individual students by examining the progress (or lack thereof) those students make over several years on standardized tests. The method enables researchers to identify the years in which student achievement grew, shrank, or stayed the same. Doing so gives a better picture of teacher effectiveness than simply averaging test scores, Sanders contends. If, say, a student in a 6th-grade class scores well above average while another scores at rock bottom--just as they did the previous year--combining their scores might suggest an acceptable, if not spectacular, performance by the teacher. A value-added analysis would reveal that neither student made progress in the teacher's class.

In Tennessee, Sanders concluded that the connection posited by many researchers between students' academic performance and such factors as socioeconomic status was not as important as teacher effectiveness. "I can adjust for race, socioeconomic status, school location, [and] class size, and come up with different results," he says. "The one thing that you can never hide is teacher quality. It is the single most important factor."

Critics of Sanders' work argue that even the best teachers may not be able to compensate for lack of family involvement, class size, students' prior knowledge, and other factors. And then there's the fact that Sanders' method relies on standardized tests, which some would say don't necessarily tell what students have learned in a particular class but what they have learned from all sources, including family, friends, and media.

Sanders has rich soil for his North Carolina project: the state has 3,660 Board-certified teachers, most among the states and nearly a quarter of the national total. That is due in part to generous incentives. Board-certified teachers get 12 percent more than their noncertified peers from the state; in districts like Charlotte-Mecklenburg they get another 10 percent on top of that. In addition, North Carolina administers end-of-grade standardized tests for students in grades 3-8 and end-of-course tests for high schoolers, providing a significant body of data for Sanders to analyze. He expects to begin publishing results later this year.

Adverse Impact

Another top research priority for the National Board is to reduce the discrepancy in pass rates between white teachers and teachers of color. While 53 percent of white candidates for certification passed in 2001, just 22 percent of African Americans and 38 percent of Hispanics did. Is there some bias hidden in the portfolio assignments? Or in the way portfolios are scored? The Board asked UNC-Greensboro's Lloyd Bond, a respected African American researcher, to look for answers. He conducted a small study and found nothing in the process itself to account for the discrepancy. "Rather, adverse impact may well be traceable to more systemic factors in U.S. society at large," he concluded, and suggested more research.

Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University took up the issue, looking at how the work of urban teachers of color gets evaluated by teacher assessment programs, including the National Board's. According to the researchers, these teachers face significant obstacles to becoming NBPTS certified. They don't get as much institutional support, incentives, and collegial encouragement to pursue certification as their white counterparts typically do. Also, they tend to teach a greater proportion of underachieving students, teach in isolation with fewer professional development opportunities, and have less familiarity with the formats and requirements of such assessments.

Furthermore, the researchers' review of educational literature on what constitutes "good teaching" revealed that such definitions do not include some of the skills and strategies employed by successful teachers of urban students of color. Research shows that such teachers usually make special efforts to develop caring relationships with students--sometimes in a way that might appear too informal, too "parental" to outsiders. These teachers also improvise ways of delivering curricula that might otherwise be out of sync with the students' cultures, experiences, and communication patterns.

"But how is a sense of caring and cultural solidarity exhibited in an assessment? What words, gestures, pieces of evidence can be collected that demonstrate the connection between a teacher and her students?" asked Ladson-Billings and Darling-Hammond in a report written for the National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching. Since the NBPTS assessment doesn't appear to take into account such relationships, some of the methods employed by urban teachers might not be measurable by scorers at the national office.

Content vs. Pedagogy

Of course, disagreements about defining good teaching are not limited to questions of racial and cultural differences. For example, the Board has been especially criticized for overemphasizing teaching methods at the expense of content knowledge. Michael Poliakoff of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) is one such critic. "[The National Board] doesn't encourage mastery of subjects as it should, nor does it ask teachers to show that their teaching translates into student achievement," he says. "A master teacher has to be a master at getting results. The process of teaching doesn't matter so much if you don't know what you're teaching and if students don't learn."

The NCTQ, which is based in Falls Church, VA, is partnering with the nine-state Education Leaders Council to develop its own advanced certification for veteran teachers and alternative certification for new teachers with $5 million in seed money from the U.S. Department of Education. The new American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence will certify teachers based on how well they and their students perform on standardized tests.

A different but related concern is raised by Robert Burroughs, assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati, who notes that the process "may be as much an evaluation of a teacher's writing about his or her teaching practice as it is an evaluation of the teaching itself."

Burroughs, who has coached more than 100 candidates for NBPTS certification at all grade levels, writes in the Journal of Teacher Education that "candidates must solve a number of rhetorical problems" in the course of preparing a portfolio. "Like a club, NBPTS has a particular way of talking (standards) and a particular way of doing (portfolio formats)," he writes. "Because these particular ways are often unfamiliar, candidates can often feel like outsiders, vulnerable to worries about adequacy and susceptible to bouts of defensiveness."

Burroughs points out that some candidates have trouble imagining their audience. Who are the unseen, unknown judges that will read this stuff? Some teachers also question whether they can adequately capture the complexity and dynamics of their practice in writing, such as the "tacit knowledge" earned through years in the classroom. Are all excellent teachers articulate about their practice? Are all those who are articulate about their practice excellent teachers?

Board Games?

Questions about performance also raise concerns about cutting corners in the application process. Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has argued that long-distance judging of applications makes cheating more likely. He points out that no input is requested from local school administrators who know the applicants and their work--a significant departure from the medical model in which supervising physicians weigh in on a young doctor's competence.

Staging video performances is another concern, says Brent Stephens, a Boston elementary school teacher who was certified last year. Stephens says that, in his experience, teachers and their coaches discussed removing all but the best-behaved kids from a class before shooting video. "It ought to be appalling to anybody," he says, "but a lot of teachers did it. So you see these videos of eight quiet kids in a conspicuously empty classroom. That sort of thing wasn't discouraged. And as more people get certified and help each other, the opportunities for gaming the system will grow."

Ann Harman of NBPTS says that cheating is no surprise but also not a great concern. "Any testing program has its cheaters, and we deal with them harshly. Anyone caught cheating is disqualified for life." She also questions whether removing certain kids would be effective: "It's not a strategy I would recommend because it doesn't give you the best opportunity to show what you can do. In fact, highlighting classes where students may present a difficult challenge is a better strategy to demonstrate competence."

Policy Issues

While the NBPTS tries to work out its research and logistical questions, a number of practical issues challenge policymakers. Since its inception, the Board has focused on identifying what it considers master teachers, leaving questions about how that designation is used to state and local school boards, says Susan Moore Johnson, Pforzheimer Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In the highly localized landscape of U.S. education, a national credential takes on very different meaning from district to district, especially in terms of teacher pay, recruitment, retention, and promotion.

As the number of National Board-certified teachers grows, national and local policymakers, union leaders, and K-12 administrators will have to decide what practical meaning such a certification should have:

• Will it become a nationally portable credential, so that teachers can pursue opportunities in new districts rather than going to the back of the line with each new job they take? Johnson points out that although most U.S. professions reward mobility, teaching stymies it because of localized contracts.

• Will the present level of financial support and big bonuses from states and districts continue? Last fall, Virginia cut back its bonus to newly certified teachers from $5,000 to about $1,632 and its annual salary bonus from $2,500 to $816, disappointing many who had been drawn by the pay increase.

• Will affluent districts poach teachers with bonuses that poorer districts can't match? In Virginia, Board-certified teachers who may lose their state bonus money might be tempted to move to higher-paying districts like Fairfax County. On the other hand, some districts are using bonuses to attract teachers to schools that need the most help: in San Francisco, teachers can earn $80,000 in bonus money over the course of 10 years for working in low-performing schools.

Think of all the measures taken in the past two decades to improve U.S. schools: changes in administrative structures, in testing and assessment, in curricula and standards, in school schedules, in graduation requirements and promotion policies. The effort to ensure that teachers--those who actually spend their days with students--are highly skilled and motivated to improve their practice is arguably the most important measure communities can support.

Early research suggests that National Board certification may be a way to do so. Its requirements are certainly more rigorous than those of standard certification programs. At the same time, it can give teachers, who so often practice in isolation, the opportunity to join a larger community of practitioners and have a say in the national dialogue on what constitutes good teaching. But like all reform measures, the success or failure of Board certification will depend on how one question gets answered: What's in it for students--and not just in well-off communities but in poor ones, too?

For Further Information

L. Bond. "Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and the Assessment of Accomplished Teaching." Journal of Negro Education 67, no. 3 (1998): 242-254.

R. Burroughs. "Composing Standards and Composing Teachers." Journal of Teacher Education 52, no. 3 (May/June 2001): 222-223.

R. Burroughs, T.A. Schwartz, and M. Hendricks-Lee. "Communities of Practice and Discourse Communities: Negotiating Boundaries in NBPTS Certification." Teachers College Record 102, no. 2 (April 2000): 346-376.

Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. "A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century." New York: Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, 1986.

S.M. Johnson. "Can Professional Certification for Teachers Re shape Teaching as a Career?" Phi Delta Kappan 82, no. 5 (January 2001): 393-399.

G. Ladson-Billings. The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.

G. Ladson-Billings and L. Darling-Hammond. "The Validity of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS)/ Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) Assessments for Effective Urban Teachers: Findings and Implications for Assessments." Paper prepared for the National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching, May 2000.

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. 1525 Wilson Blvd., Suite 500, Arlington, VA 22209; 703-465-2700; fax: 703-465-2715.

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do. Arlington, VA: NBPTS, 1999.

M. Podgursky. "Should States Subsidize National Certification?" Education Week, April 11, 2001: 38, 40-41.

M. Podgursky. "Defrocking the National Board." Education Next 1, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 79-82.

M. Poliakoff. "Mastering the Basics."Philanthropy 15, no. 6 (October 2001): 22-25.

C. Tell. "Appreciating Good Teaching: A Conversation with Lee Shulman." Educational Leadership 58, no. 5 (February 2001): 6-11.

D.D. Wilcox. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: Can It Live Up to Its Promise? Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2000.