From Large Urban to Small Rural Schools: An Empirical Study of National Board Certification and Teaching Effectiveness. Final Report

One of the most important issues facing education policymakers is how to prepare students to be productive citizens in an increasingly competitive global economy. While state accountability systems suggest that the proportion of students meeting state benchmarks is rising, performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been relatively stagnant. Improving teacher quality has been central to significant national education initiatives in recent decades. One-way teachers can demonstrate their skill level and successes in the classroom is by earning certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). The NBPTS was established to help professionalize the field of teaching by providing an accepted definition of what "accomplished" teaching is and recognizing teachers who do their jobs exceptionally well. An original goal of National Board certification (NBC) was to build an authentic assessment system that could reliably measure what experienced teachers should know and be able to do (Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, 1986. This study analyzes the NBC among high school teachers in understudied subject areas and locales to help fill gaps in the research literature. The research team selected two locales for this analysis, Kentucky and the Chicago public schools. Chicago, a racially and ethnically diverse city, has one of the largest urban school districts in the country. Kentucky, by contrast, is a largely rural state with some suburban and urban areas. [This report was written with Christine Mokher, Thomas Geraghty, and Lauren Sartain.]