NBPTS Certification

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

I. Introduction

Educational policymaking over the last twenty years has been widely influenced by the standards movement, which calls for higher standards for student performance. Increasingly, policymakers have recognized that for students to meet high standards, their teachers must also be of high quality. The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) was created in 1987, as an outgrowth of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, to help increase the overall level of teacher quality and professionalism by establishing high standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do and by recognizing teachers who meet those standards. Since its inception, many policymakers and educators have identified the NBPTS certification process as an important mechanism for improving the quality of the teaching workforce.

NBPTS advocates argue that NBPTS has created a formal process whereby outstanding experienced teachers with demonstrated skills would be appropriately recognized. They see the National Board as a potential bulwark against the rising tide of teacher mediocrity and an important step towards greater recognition and respect for teaching as a profession. The hope among advocates is that NBPTS teachers can lead in changing school culture and practices in ways that ultimately have significant beneficial impacts on students. NBPTS is supported by groups like the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) (1996), which called for at least one National Board certified teacher in each of the country's 105,000 schools by 2006. Reports by the American Federation of Teachers (2000) and the American Council on Education (2000) also support the expansion of NBPTS certification.

Critics, by contrast, contend that NBPTS is primarily an insiders' organization that bases its authority on the evaluation of its own members. The inclusion of two prominent educators' unions on the Board also raises red flags for some (Wilcox, 1999). The relatively few studies which do assess the impact of NBPTS have been criticized both for a lack of independence from the organization and for a focus on teaching methods rather than student outcomes. There is also concern that significant amounts of federal and state funding have gone to support an institution that has yet to clearly demonstrate success in raising student achievement (Ballou and Podgursky, 1998).

Despite these concerns, widespread belief in the NBPTS model has prompted many states to subsidize the initial $2,300 assessment fee (cost of application) for individual teachers and to award bonuses or salary supplements to successful candidates as well. According to NBPTS, in 2002 at least 47 states provided at least one form of incentive for National Board Certification, and 32 states provided salary supplements (NBPTS.org). To date, however, very little research has been conducted on the recipients of this investment: those who seek NBPTS certification and those who are certified. To our knowledge there are no large-scale quantitative studies on the individual, school, district, and community factors that are associated with the decision to apply to NBPTS and the likelihood of certification, conditional on application. Thus, it is not known whether the financial incentives that districts may offer NBPTS certified teachers lead to higher rates of application. Information on these issues could help states and districts craft effective incentive policies, in addition to clarifying their perceptions of the value of NBPTS certification. In this study, we explore the factors that are related to both teachers' decisions to seek NBPTS certification and the candidates' ultimate success in the certification process.

Our research utilizes data provided by North Carolina on its teaching workforce and data from NBPTS on National Board applicants to relate the characteristics of North Carolina teachers and their school districts and communities to their probabilities of applying for and receiving NBPTS certification. We focus on two topics in particular: the factors associated with NBPTS application and whether or not those factors have changed over time, and the factors associated with NBPTS certification, given application, and whether or not they have changed over time.

We find significant increases in application rates (the number of teacher applications per total eligible teachers) and certification rates (the number of certifications per applicant) in North Carolina in the 1997 to 2000 time period (see Figure 2). The increase in the application rate appears to result primarily from an increase in the underlying propensity to apply to NBPTS, while the increase in the certification rate appears to result primarily from changes in the applicant pool. All else equal, women and African-Americans teachers are more likely to apply to NBPTS, as are those teachers who perform better on standardized tests. Conditional on application, we find men and African-American applicants are less likely to be certified, while teachers performing better on standardized tests are significantly more likely to be certified. Low-income, high-minority student populations are less likely to have access to NBPTS certified teachers in their schools. This finding is partially explained by lower certification rates among applicants at schools serving more disadvantaged students.

The paper is laid out as follows: Section II provides some background on the types of financial support offered to NBPTS candidates, successful applicants and the NBPTS assessment process itself. The data and methodological approach used in this study are described in Section III, and our findings are described in Section IV. We report the results of simulations based on our findings in Section V, and Section VI offers some concluding thoughts.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding for this study from a Field Initiated Studies Grant provided by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. We thank Jim Hunt, former governor of North Carolina and founding chair of NBPTS, for encouraging North Carolina to participate in the study as well as NBPTS and ETS for supplying data on National Board teacher candidates. We would also like to thank the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and particularly Gordon Millspaugh, for supplying the data for this study. This paper could not have been completed without the valuable assistance of Drew Gitomer who assisted us throughout its evolution. We would also like to thank Karen Callahan, Albert Liu, Alissa Anderson, Duncan Chaplin, and Helen Fu of the Urban Institute, Harold Wenglinsky, Ashaki Coleman, Mary Beth Hanley, Kate Pashley, and Richard Tannenbaum of ETS, and Carol Wallace from the University of Washington. All opinions expressed in this paper represent those of the authors and not the institutions with which they are affiliated or the Department of Education. All errors in this paper are solely the authors' responsibility.

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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