A study in South Carolina has concluded that teachers who have obtained certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) aren’t appreciably better than are teachers who haven’t. The story is here.
Jim Hunt sold this lemon to North Carolina big time and we have more NBPTS certified teachers than any other state, due to our extremely high subsidization of the program (the state picks up the full cost for as many teachers as want to go for it) and big rewards for those who get certified (a 12% pay boost). The problem is that there is no reason to believe that doing the various things necessary for certification necessarily makes a teacher any better. All it proves is that those who get certified are able to say what the evaluators employed by NBPTS want to hear.
No business would give big raises to workers based on the evaluation of an outside party that never actually saw them work, but that’s the idea here.
