The Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee recently invited discussion of National Board Certification, a Hunt-era program that gives teachers who successfully complete the program a 12 percent pay increase for ten years. Every year, the state must appropriate tens of millions of dollars to teachers who have the certification and millions more to pay the fees of teachers who seek certification.
The Left is ready to declare the National Board Certification program (as well as social engineering and teacher indoctrination efforts) a success based on a single UNC-Chapel Hill study that looked at teacher attributes and nearly half a million test scores. To be sure, it is not an insignificant number and I have a great deal of respect for the researchers that take on such a huge data set.
But remember that the state has over 1.4 million students that take at least one test every year, so this data represents a fraction of the number of tests administered in a given year. More importantly, it may be difficult to generalize the results. There have been significant changes to the testing program over the last four years and more changes to the testing program and curriculum are on the horizon.
Sorry. Back to the issue of National Board Certification. According to Kristopher Nordstrom of the General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division, research on National Board Certification continues to produce mixed results. He’s right and even the most ardent defenders of the program should acknowledge that fact. Indeed, research findings give us many reasons to question the costs and benefits of board certification.
We should be asking ourselves whether the money spent on National Board Certification would be better spent elsewhere. It is curious how the Left rarely asks that question.
