The Core Knowledge Blog

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards should consider student-learning gains when deciding which teachers deserve national certification, a team of researchers says in an interesting study reported in Education Week.

Students who are taught by teachers certified by the board outperform students whose teachers lack such certification on standardized tests, according to a study released last month.  Now, researchers from Harvard, Dartmouth and the Los Angeles Unified School District “make a case for combining the current measures with newer, ‘value added’ calculations that take into account the test-score gains that students make in applicants’ classes, or at least lending more weight in the assessment process to the individual tests that link most closely to improved student achievement,” says EdWeek.

For some reason, the teacher-effectiveness debate is broken into two camps, says Thomas J. Kane, a study author and a professor of education and economics at Harvard’s graduate school of education. One side focuses on students’ achievement, and then there’s another side that focuses primarily on measures of teacher practice. We think the reasonable approach is not either, but both.

To its credit, the research was one of 22 research efforts commissioned by NBPTS to gauge the effectiveness of its process. The results are apparently non-binding on NBPTS; they’re not obligated to adopt the value-added recommendation.  But one wonders if the fact that the report is being discussed in EdWeek before it’s release isn’t tantamount to a trial balloon of sorts.