Another Bullet in the NBPTS Hater’s Gun

An article that should give our budget writers some pause, from Education Week:

Does having a teacher who is nationally certified make a difference when it comes to boosting student test scores?

Yes and no, according to a set of working papers published online by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER, a new federal research center based at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Since last year, center researchers have been mining the mountains of student-achievement statistics piling up in states for answers to questions about teacher quality. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states must submit plans for ensuring schools are staffed by “highly qualified” teachers. Yet studies have turned up no definitive evidence on what determines teaching quality and how public policy can affect the hiring and distribution of effective teachers.

The four reports posted last week draw on statistics from Florida and North Carolina. Both states have long-running data systems in place that use student “identifiers” so that researchers can match students’ test scores to specific teachers and classrooms.

While their methods were similar, the researchers came to slightly different conclusions in several areas, including the degree to which more-experienced teachers, or those with better scholastic aptitude, can produce better-than-average learning gains for students.

The working papers are available from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. The sharpest differences came on the question of whether teachers who hold certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards are more effective than teachers without that status. Since 1987, more than 55,000 teachers have earned national-board recognition, which involves a lengthy evaluation process.

In their paper, researchers Helen F. Ladd, Charles Clotfelter, and Jacob L. Vigdor, looking at 10 years of North Carolina data on students in grades 3, 4, and 5, found that students in classes taught by nationally certified teachers learned significantly more over the course of a school year than students of teachers without that distinction.

But Tim R. Sass and Douglas N. Harris, in a separate study of Florida students in grades 3-10, concluded that teachers with the credential seemed to be more effective only in some grades, some subjects, or some tests.

“We’re continuing to do studies to try to sort out the reasons for our different findings, but right now we don’t have a particular explanation,” said Ms. Ladd, a professor of public policy and economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If the state is going to make a significant investment in seeing that teachers get the National Board certificate, then they also need to put the mechanism in place to see if the certificate makes a difference. Getting the additional pay should be contingent on providing NWEA, WASL, or ITBS data so that comparison can be done.