We are pretty good at generating buzz for upcoming reports at Fordham (doesn't hurt that those reports are typically buzzworthy) but this article in Education Week yesterday fostered buzz without alerting me to the bite. It summarizes what I imagine to be fairly complex research findings on a topic that many folks are interested in, then doesn't tell us exactly when the actually study is to be published or released (sometime "soon"). So I rely on the journalist's take of the findings (risky but unavoidable).
Harvard researcher Tom Kane and colleagues apparently conducted a random assignment study analyzing whether students in classrooms with National Boards teachers (i.e., those that have received the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards-NBPTS-credential) learned more than students taught by comparison teachers. To my knowledge, this is the first random assignment study conducted on this contentious topic (see here, here, and here). We're told that students with teachers with high ratings on the Boards gained more than students in classes with lower-scoring Board teachers. And though test score differences between students with Board teachers and with non-applicant teachers were positive, they were not statistically significant. Kane sums it up this way:
Ineffective teachers are just as likely as effective teachers to apply for national-board certification but the board process does seem to provide some information on teachers' effectiveness, so people who are certified are a little better than the average non-applicant, and unsuccessful applicants are worse than non-applicants.
Okay, so some encouraging news for National Boards folks but not mind-blowing either. The value-added analysis, though, showed even stronger results, i.e., it better predicted which teachers were most likely to produce sizable student learning gains than did the National Board measures. Based on the study findings, researchers are calling on the NBPTS to take into account student learning gains as part of their credentialing process. Hmmm... sounds like a pretty good idea, but not one that will likely be embraced anytime soon. Mary Dilworth, NBPTS vice president, responds, "We need to spend a little more time looking actually at the assessment that we're using to gauge student performance." True, but this doesn't rule out the possibility of piloting a value-added National Boards credential in states which have sound data infrastructure, strong standards, and highly-regarded, aligned assessments. It would be a welcome contribution to our understanding of teacher quality.
I was intrigued by the article and really look forward to reading the study. I'm just not sure when that's going to happen...
