Is National Board Certification for teachers a joke?

THE CUPCAKE LAWS: DIARY OF A [first year] TEACHER
National Board Certification
December 2007

...Several teachers from our school have pending applications to become National Board certified. Today is the day that their results came out. Today is the day that I learned that National Board Certification is a big fat joke on the American Public School System. Despite the program’s ambitious aim to reward stellar teachers, I realized today that lousy teachers can easily become certified, while great teachers can be rejected and ignored.

You don’t have to be an excellent teacher to become National Board Certified; you just have to create an excellent application portfolio. You can be a loser teacher and become certified! All you need is one good buddy who passed in a previous year to hand over their old portfolio, and then--voila! Throw in a few good videos of yourself teaching a lesson, rewrite your old buddy’s information to match your own, and there you have it- the prestige of being a National Board Certified teacher. What bullshit! Mrs. Frankenstein, who thinks that Alaska is a part of Canada, passed the National Boards today. Esther, who confuses her students with stories of Harriet Tubman building a railroad and thinks that the word legal is a noun, has been a National Board Certified teacher for years. What a joke! On the other hand, wonderful teachers like Caroline, who engage their students on a regular basis and teach phenomenal lessons, are rejected for certification. How ridiculous! I can’t believe that the National Board Certification committee doesn’t realize the holes in their program.

I have lost all respect for those who brag about being certified. Losers can get certified and master teachers can be rejected. The title holds no true standard of excellence.

Of course, now that I have figured out the system, I will definitely apply for National Board Certification. (If I am still a teacher in three years!) Not for the prestige of the award, but because I want the money.

Does National Board Certification improve education?

I think that the people who apply for National Board Certification were already slightly better than average, so it proves nothing that researchers have found that they're slightly better than average after certification. It would be helpful to see how much these teachers were changed by certification, and no one has done that. Do their students progress faster now? Who knows?




Credential of NBPTS Has Impact
Still, evidence scant that program transformed field
By Debra Viadero and Vaishali Honawar
June 13, 2008

Teachers who earn advanced certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards are more effective than teachers without that credential, but there’s little evidence to show the program has transformed the field in the broader ways its founders envisioned...

The Arlington, Va.-based standards board, created in 1987, has received more than $100 million in federal money to develop and run a system of assessments for recognizing accomplished teachers. And, as of 2006, 42 states were offering teachers financial incentives for earning the voluntary national certification. Between 2003 and 2007, the program awarded its certification status to more than 63,800 teachers.

In the new report, however, a 17-member panel of the National Research Council says it’s still unclear whether the process itself leads to better-quality teaching...



rwruth wrote:
Teachers who complete the NBPTS program are usually teachers who want to improve their skills and are already very good teachers. I suspect that with or without the NB certification, these teachers would have close to the same positive impact on student test scores as the NRC committee found.
Robert Ruth
6/18/2008

Dr. Painter wrote:
The mindset of uniformity that pervades education will keep teachers in mediocrity until they understand that individual accomplishments benefit the profession. When I gave a presentation on NBPTS, a teacher indignantly told me, "I think ALL teachers should be given National Board Certification!" I was treated negatively by my colleagues after achieving National Board Certification, and I was actively discouraged by my administrators, who stated they did not want an art teacher to surpass the academic teachers. Education careers would be improved by making NBPTS one of a variety of programs in which teachers may excel. As Sir Ken Robinson wrote, "Real creativity comes from finding your medium, being in your element."
6/18/2008 EdWeek