National Certification: Money for Nothing
May 9, 2006 Education Week ($) headline: “National Board Teachers No Better Than Other Educators, Long-Awaited Study Finds”
The study, conducted by William Sanders of “value-added assessment” fame, found “basically no difference in the achievement levels of students whose teachers earned the prestigious NBPTS credential, those who tried but failed to earn it, those who never tried to get the certification, or those who earned it after the student test-score data was collected.”
Sanders told Education Week that to choose a board-certified teacher over a non-board-certified teacher would be “only trivially better than a coin flip.”
The Stone study and the Goldhaber study had similar findings years ago. In criticizing the Stone study in 2002, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards touted the upcoming Sanders study. Now they’re slamming it.
Millions of dollars are spent annually by teachers, organizations, and school systems to pay the costs of getting certified. Hundreds of millions more in bonuses are paid to teachers who achieved national certification. The studies do not conclude that they are bad teachers, only that national certification for them does no additional good for their students. Let’s spend the money elsewhere.
“New” Study Update: Congratulations to the Boston Globe and ABC News for picking up the bogus Reuters story on NEA’s “new” study from 2003, based on data from 1996 through 2001. Sploid made fun of it, but still accepted it as real. But today’s big prize goes to the Detroit Free Press, which did an original rewrite of the NEA press release, but still managed to repeat the old data. I’m sure you’re all sitting around the lounge talking about how journalistically irresponsible those blogger guys are.
May 10th, 2006 at 18:06
Pity Paul Harvey didn’t get a chance to read his copy of the EIA Communique. He was quoting the NEA study yesterday at noon without your clarifications.
May 10th, 2006 at 19:07
Hi –
Actually, we didn’t mention any study at all … only that NEA was promoting its teachers lobby with the drop-out factoid. We made fun of them for always trying to squeeze more money out of us, despite schools getting worse every year.
They sort of blew it by saying in their press release that the figure never changes over the decades.
May 10th, 2006 at 21:09
Sanders is a hero of mine. Then again, I’m a math teacher–I love numbers.