Study: National certification has measurable benefits

A new study by the State Department of Education shows that teachers who earn national certification produce students with measurably higher achievement, but it is not clear that the certification can be credited with the results.

Researcher Dr. George Noell released the results of his study at Thursday’s meeting of the Blue Ribbon Commission for Educational Excellence. The study was requested after State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek told a Senate committee that certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards does not necessarily enhance classroom teaching.

Pastorek’s statement was largely seen as cover for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to halt state funding of a $5,000 annual stipend for teachers who earn national certification. The superintendent later apologized for his comments.

Dr. Noell said that his study is the largest ever done on the effectiveness of nationally certified teachers, and that it confirmed other studies that “suggest there are advantages” to the certification. The study was limited to measuring improved outcomes on standardized tests, and included test data for about 250,000 Louisiana students over a three-year period. There are more than 1,500 nationally certified teachers in the state.

The researcher cautioned commission members about limitations of his study. “We know how much more effective (nationally certified teachers) are,” he said. “We don’t know if it is because of national board certification.”

The positive results could also be explained because those teachers are more motivated than others, he said. The study did not include a measure of test results before and after teachers earned national certification.

Dr. Noell said the survey results will probably not be very helpful in the debate over payment of the stipend to nationally certified teachers. “It is complicated,” he said, “because we made a promise and passed a law.”

The underlying issue is the state of the economy, according to Dr. Noell. “If it weren’t for the current budget crisis,” he said, “I wouldn’t have been asked to do this work.”

Watering down the teaching degree?

Try to follow this logic: in a state which is constantly ratcheting up requirements for teachers and demanding more rigorous evaluations, one important group suggests lowering the requirements to earn a teaching degree.

Advocate reporter Will Sentell writes here that the Blue Ribbon Commission for Educational Excellence was asked by the Board of Regents to consider reducing the number of hours required for a teaching degree to 120. Currently, the requirement ranges from 124 to 128 or higher.

LFT President Steve Monaghan is right to question whether the real intent is to cut costs for colleges, and whether the action might devalue the teaching degree.

Not quite right at The Advocate

The first paragraph in this story by Advocate reporter Will Sentell doesn't get it quite right, although the rest of the article accurately portrays LFT's response to the report that a consultant recently gave the Blue Ribbon Commission studying teacher pay.

That consultant suggested cutting the teacher salary schedule by 10 percent, and claimed that teachers' advanced degrees and years of classroom experience don't improve student achievement.

The reporter's error is in equating our opposition to pay cuts to opposing supplements for teachers who take on additional tasks or agree to work in especially challenged schools. That's a distinction LFT simply has not made. Additional pay for such work can be a good idea, provided teachers have a voice in creating the plan.

Our beef was with consultants who claim that a) teachers stagnate after five years and b) there is no value in advanced degrees.

Consultants wrong on teacher pay

“We know that getting a degree is not related to student achievement.”
-Education consultant Tabitha Grossman

If this is the best consulting the state can come up with, teachers and their students are in trouble.

The Blue Ribbon Commission for Educational Excellence is supposedly exploring better ways to, as this article by Advocate reporter Will Sentell puts it, "pay teachers to make them more effective and to aid students."

What sort of great ideas did the state-paid consultants come up with? Here's one: cut the state teacher salary schedule by 10% in order to give some teachers bonuses of between $3,000 and $6,000.

And how can we justify such a radical reordering of the salary schedule? According to the consultant, advanced degrees mean nothing, and after five years in the classroom teachers stagnate and don't do anything different.

Those are extremely radical propositions that are very difficult to defend. Other consultants might have come up with other, proven solutions, like smaller classes, extended school days and years, placing the most qualified teachers in the most challenged schools, etc.

But you get what you paid for. And the people who paid for these consultants definitely got what they paid for - an assault on the professional educators who are dedicated to the children in their classrooms.

Fortunately, LFT President Steve Monaghan is a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission. Steve responded with this comment:

"We will never tell teachers who have invested time, money and effort in
earning advanced degrees that they labored in vain. And we simply reject the
contention that teachers stagnate after five years. Teachers are by nature
life-time learners. Good teachers continuously learn new skills and approaches
that they can bring to their classrooms.

"We hope that over the next few months the commission will hear from
other experts who can provide very different perspectives."

A second consultant told the commission about the success of a performance-based teacher pay plan in Denver, Colorado.

But as Monaghan pointed out in this press release, there are big differences between Denver and Louisiana.

A state (Louisiana) comprises many school districts with varying needs and resources, while a single urban school system (Denver) can focus more narrowly on its specific needs.

But the more important difference is that Denver has a collective bargaining agreement with its teachers. Every change in the way teachers are paid was negotiated, and teachers voted on the plan before it could go into effect.

A plan like Denver's won't work until Louisiana has a statewide collective bargaining law.

The Blue Ribbon Commission has until May to prepare a report for Gov. Bobby Jindal, the Board of elementary and Secondary Education and the Board of Regents. Let's hope some better ideas emerge before then.

A tale of two commissions

Most people are probably not even aware that Louisiana has one commission called the Blue Ribbon Commission for Education Excellence, and another one called the Accountability Commission. They have no power to make law or set policy, but they are factories for ideas that can eventually become part of the state’s education laws and policies.

The two commissions don’t always know what the other is up to, and since the news media rarely cover meetings of either one, the public is usually unaware of their activities.

A lot of mischief can be achieved in the dark.

Recently, the Blue Ribbon Commission decided to apply for a $25,000 grant from the National Governor’s Association to fund the search for a “new model for teacher compensation.” The Department of Education will kick in another $25,000 to complete funding for a seven-member research team. Part of the charge to the team will be to develop "policies or identify laws that need to be added or changed and present them to the boards and/or governor."

By May of 2010, this new model will be presented at a joint meeting of the Blue Ribbon Commission and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

The Blue Ribbon Commission, by the way, no longer includes members from any of the state’s professional teacher organizations. We can expect little, if any, input from classroom professionals in the creation of this “new model for teacher compensation.”

And just what sort of new model might be envisioned by the project?

This is where one of the budget items in the Department of Education’s consultant wish list comes into play. Superintendent of Education Paul; Pastorek wants to spend $580,000 on exploring the frontier of “Value Added Assessments.”

That’s code for paying teachers based on how their students perform on standardized tests.

Which brings us to the other commission, the Accountability Commission. This one does include representatives of the teacher organizations. The Accountability Commission members have been asked to recommend “growth models” and “value added assessments.”

But the Accountability Commission was not aware of the Department of Education’s request for a $580,000 consultancy fee to find the same information.

And where to all these seemingly unconnected threads of story weave together? Check out the editorial in today’s Advocate. As far as the capital city’s newspaper of record is concerned, the fight over basing teacher pay on test scores is over, and test scores have won: “The reality,” says the editor, “is that an anti-testing agenda, from unions or others in education, is dead.”

Well, as Mark Twain once famously observed, “The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.”