How can excellent teaching be recognized and rewarded? We've been waiting a long time for a good answer to this question, and last week we finally got one. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards awarded its first certificates of advanced competency. The recipients were 81 middle and junior high school teachers from across the country who had demonstrated that they knew their stuff in a grueling, year-long series of assessments.
Some heroic souls will do their best no matter how little recognition they get. Most people, though, respond to external incentives, and teachers are no different from the rest of us. But if you don't get the incentives right, you are likely to make things worse instead of better.
Merit pay has been the usual strategy for recognizing and rewarding excellence in teaching, and there's nothing wrong, in principle, with giving people pay for performance. However, most teachers oppose merit pay because it often has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with how well you get along with the principal. Good teaching is not the same thing as being willing to take extra bus duty or prompt in getting paperwork back to the central office. And the one or two hasty classroom visits that most principals pay in the course of a year may not be enough to show who is doing good teaching.
Another problem with merit pay is that it encourages teachers to compete rather than collaborate. Research and common sense tell us that teaching improves when teachers work together to share ideas and problems. With merit pay schemes, where a limited pot of money is shared by a limited number of people, the incentive is to keep good ideas to yourself: Why reveal a successful strategy for teaching a math topic to a "competitor"? It's easy to see who loses in this kind of arrangement--the kids.
The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards proposes a totally different model for assessing and promoting excellence in teaching. Over the past eight years, the board, a majority of whose members are K-12 teachers, has been developing standards for what teachers should know and be able to do. And it plans eventually to offer board certification in more than 30 teaching specialties at every level and in every field. As the assessments taken by the middle and junior high school generalists who were certified last week demonstrate, board certification will not be a rubber stamp.
The first stage involved submitting a portfolio of work that included videotapes of classroom lessons along with extensive written material describing and analyzing how these teachers help their students learn. Applicants reported spending an average of 1 OD-plus hours getting their portfolios ready. Next, they traveled to an assessment center where they faced two days of oral and written assessments. They evaluated videos of other teachers and discussed their own practice, they created elaborate lesson plans and they demonstrated their knowledge of the subject matter they teach. The assessments were not the machine-scored, minimum-competency tests we often associate with evaluating teachers: They required the kind of mastery achieved by people at the top of their profession.
The National Board does not represent a reform imposed on teaching from outside. Rather, we have a profession defining its own high standards for excellence and creating a national credential to recognize practitioners who meet the standards--the way physicians and lawyers and architects have already done.
The existence of this new credential could have an enormous impact on classroom teaching. There are currently few ways of rewarding and encouraging excellent teaching. As a result, the best teachers often accept promotions into administration, and an important resource is lost to the classroom and the profession. Board certification can provide an incentive for these teachers to stay in the classroom where they can go on giving kids the benefit of their knowledge and skill--and where they can help other teachers improve the way they teach.
But board certification is only half the story. The other half depends on what school districts do. Will they recognize the achievement of teachers who gain the certification by offering them higher salaries? Will they seek them out when they are looking for new teachers? Will they see certification as an important professional achievement and offer these teachers responsibilities commensurate with their expertise?
Hiring new teachers is, to a large extent, a question of supply and demand. It is dependent on things over which a district may have little control--the number of students who will be showing up next year and the availability of teachers. But retaining excellent teachers depends on recognizing who they are and giving them adequate financial and professional incentives. The National Board gives us a way of identifying outstanding teachers. This could be a turning point for the profession. But it depends on what happens next.