Breaking New Ground

According to James A. Kelly, the founding president of NBPTS who led the organization for 12 years, the fledgling organization uniquely focused on a profoundly significant challenge: identifying the attributes of excellent teaching. Until then, Kelly explains, “the entire teaching issue [had focused] on entry requirements.” The NBPTS, he says, came to grips with two vital questions: What is it that the truly accomplished teacher should know and be able to do? And how can we develop a performance-based assessment process for determining whether teachers have indeed met those standards?

The process for arriving at answers to those questions was perhaps as revolutionary as the answers themselves. Never before, Kelly notes, had teachers actually formed the majority in a major educational reform organization. Indeed, from the beginning, the 63-member board of directors has always had a majority of teachers on it. Other directors include school administrators, school board leaders, governors and state legislators, higher education officials, business and community leaders, as well as teacher union leaders. Until then, declares Kelly, teachers and teacher union chiefs had never actually “met to talk to each other about teaching.” In the last analysis, he says, the full, broad range of participants had “created a system in which [they] could have trust.”

As of summer 2003, legislative and policy action creating incentives and recognition for National Board Certification has been enacted in 49 states and in approximately 486 school districts. This national, voluntary system has certified 24,000 classroom teachers, each of whom has an average of 14 years of teaching experience. In a nation in which roughly 3.1 million teachers are employed in public schools, the challenge to produce vastly larger numbers of teachers with National Board Certification is formidable. “The main thing that is needed to increase National Board Certification,” comments now-former North Carolina Governor Hunt and current Carnegie Corporation trustee, “[is] that policymakers make available [to teachers] significant and tangible incentives and rewards.” In North Carolina, he points out, “one of the most successful states” in developing a corps of teachers with National Board Certification (5,500 of the state’s approximately 100,000 teachers have achieved it), the state covers the full cost of certification and provides candidates with three days of leave; successful candidates receive a 12 percent increase in salary.

Still, after 20 years of a national effort to improve teaching and teacher quality, a five percent accreditation rate in North Carolina, the one state in the nation that is clearly the most focused on this issue, could lead some to argue that school reform is a failure. Certainly, it underlines the philosophy that emboldens the Corporation’s long-term commitment to teacher reform: that no progress, no program, no one strategy will achieve instant national change. Reform is as much process as progress; reform demands identification of major problems, promising ideas for change and the mobilization of political will to move ideas onto the nation’s “to-do” list.

Current NBPTS President Joseph Aguerrebere expresses the hope that prospective teachers, like prospective doctors, will come to see professional certification as the culmination of their training. Following the medical model, says Aguerrebere, the hope is that “Eventually we will get to the point where all teachers. . .will immediately move into an induction stage after three years of teaching [and pursue advanced certification].” While only 50 percent of those who apply for advanced certification succeed the first time around, says Aguerrebere, “Even those who don’t succeed say it was the best professional development experience they’ve ever had.” Participating in the certification process, he adds, helps teachers “to be much more reflective in their practice [as teachers].” NBPTS’s emphasis on standards “adds a lot to our knowledge base,” he points out, and “the candidates [who] are putting themselves on the line” by participating in this most “public” process all contribute to and benefit from this enhanced knowledge base. Moreover, the benefits of certification extend beyond the individual teacher earning it. Aguerrebere explains that teachers who have achieved advanced certification frequently mentor other teachers, form local and statewide teacher networks, exert leadership in advocating educational policy changes and create candidate support programs.

Acutely aware that teacher education reform is a long-term enterprise, Carnegie Corporation of New York continues to add its support to initiatives aimed at strengthening and improving the licensure, certification and accreditation of teachers and the schools that train them. Included among this group of Corporation grantees are the following:

• The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), a project of the council of Chief State School Officers. INTASC works to establish stronger state licensure standards by helping member states to learn about and collaborate on the development of educational policies on teaching, new accountability requirements for teacher preparation programs; new teacher assessment techniques; and new professional development programs for teachers.
• The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) focuses on the improvement and strengthening of teacher preparation through the development of a performance-based accreditation system.
• The Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) also offers a performance-based approach to accreditation, which requires that institutions of higher education provide research-based evidence of student learning as a prerequisite to accreditation.
  

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