Does national certification help students?

An article in today's Journal Sentinel announces that a local foundation has given $20,000 to increase the number of teachers with national certification. The reader is left with two puzzles:

1. Why is the grant being announced by Milwaukee's mayor rather than the MPS superintendent? The superintendent is strangely missing from the article?

2. Will this grant help students? Despite the millions of dollars spent nationwide on national certification of teachers (called National Board for Professional Teaching Standards or NBPTS), there is remarkable little research on its effectiveness.

A recent study by Goldhaber--the most favorable to certification so far--found that students of teachers gaining NBPTS certification did slightly better, on average, than students whose teachers attempted certification but failed to gain it. But it did not find that the teachers improved their effectiveness as the result of the process. Nor did it find that those applying for certification, as a group, were more effective than those who did not. This latter finding seems particularly surprising since one might expect that teachers willing to put in the time and effort for certification would be more committed than their colleagues.

Based on this study it is hard to figure out how NBPTS certification could be used to improve teaching. Knowing that one group of teachers is slightly more effective than another brings benefits only if, as a result, more of the first group stays in teaching or more of the second leaves. Many of the unsuccessful NBPTS applicants are more effective, as judged by student scores, than many of the successful ones. Based on the standard deviations given, I estimate that about 44% of the unsuccessful applicants had higher student gains than the average successful applicant. So NBPTS would not serve as a particularly effective screening device.

Education has a long history of embracing panaceas that lack a research justification, only to eventually abandon them and turn to the next one. Let's hope that NBPTS certification proves to be the exception.