Assessing Accomplished Teaching Advanced-Level Certification Programs (2008) / Chapter Skim
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11 The Cost-Effectiveness of Certification as a Means of Improving Teacher Quality
11 The Cost-Effectiveness of Certification as a Means of Improving Teacher Quality
Pages 223-247
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From page 223... ...
Given the federal dollars invested in the program, it is reasonable for Congress to ask if the investment has been wise. To respond to this aspect of the committee's charge, our evaluation framework includes the following question: Question 8: To what extent does the advanced-level teacher certifi cation program accomplish its objectives in a cost-effective manner, relative to other approaches intended to improve teacher quality?
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From page 224... ...
We note here that simply identifying highly skilled teachers provides no direct benefit, and therefore the first benefit requires that some action be taken once highly skilled teachers are identified. For example, administrators and policy makers could implement incentives for teachers who are identified as highly skilled, either to encourage them to remain in teaching
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From page 225... ...
For example, inservice professional development is intended to improve teacher quality directly (Benefit 2) without providing a means for identifying highly skilled teachers (Benefit 1)
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From page 226... ...
Benefit 1: Identifying Highly Skilled Teachers With respect to the NBPTS program's ability to identify high-quality teachers, the available evidence shows that the board's certification program does identify skilled practitioners, whether defined in terms of teachers' skills or students' achievement. The content- and construct-based validity evidence, discussed in Chapter 5, indicates that the assessment is measuring the knowledge and skills it is intended to measure, which were judged to represent accomplished teaching.
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From page 227... ...
lead to assigning board-certified teachers to leadership roles that allow them to help improve the teaching of nonboard-certified teachers; 3d. improve the sorting of teachers across job assignments by identify ing highly skilled teachers and targeting incentives to encourage teachers to take positions in difficult schools; 3e.
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From page 228... ...
In considering the impact of the NBPTS on the education system, it is important to distinguish the effect that board certification can have on the system on its own from effects that require other actors in the system to use board certification as a lever for change. If it were established that board certification acted to improve teacher quality directly (Benefit 2/3a)
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From page 229... ...
The following conclusion summarizes our synthesis of the effectiveness of board certification as a route toward improving teaching quality: Conclusion 11-1: There is evidence from both a psychometric review of the assessment process and analysis of student achievement test results that board certification identifies highly qualified teachers. There is no conclusive evidence that teachers improve their practices by going through the certification process, and there is essentially no evidence that certification or the existing recognition and financial incentives awarded to board-certified teachers in some states are sufficient to substantially increase their tenure as teachers.
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From page 230... ...
In addition, for the purposes of comparing the cost-effectiveness of different mechanisms for improving teacher quality, it is likely that the available data on both the effectiveness and the costs will be fairly coarse for most of the options, so it is likely that a coarse cost analysis for board certification is not only the best we can do but perhaps also all that is needed. Below we provide estimates of each of these costs.
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From page 231... ...
Since that cost is money already spent, it is inappropriate to include it in an analysis of the ongoing cost-effectiveness of the program as a means for increasing teacher quality. However, in a later section, we discuss the nature of the country's $200 million investment in the research and development leading to board certification and consider the coste ffectiveness of that investment.
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From page 232... ...
Costs of Mentors and Support Programs The NBPTS estimates that approximately 80 percent of candidates participate in a support program of one kind or another, although the basis for this figure is unclear and the kind of support offered by these programs varies considerably across jurisdictions. In some school systems, support is provided in a relatively informal manner, such as weekly meetings among the candidates with mentorship provided by teachers who are already board certified.
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From page 233... ...
The costs for a successful applicant in the year of application thus total roughly $20,000, if all costs are converted into dollars. Since roughly half of all candidates are successfully certified and since certification lasts for 10 years, this means that the application costs for every two applicants can be spread over 10 years of teaching by a single board-certified teacher, resulting in a cost of $4,000 per year of certified teaching. To obtain the total cost per year of certified teaching, we need to add the per-year cost of the salary bonuses, roughly $3,000-$5,000, to the per-year cost of a successful application, resulting in a cost of $7,000-$9,000 per year of certified teaching.
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From page 234... ...
Evidence from value-added analyses suggests that board-certified teachers produce student achievement test scores that are 0.04 standard deviation higher than those produced by the average nonapplicant. We consider this in the context of a hypothetical policy in which all teachers were required to become board certified (which admittedly is both untried and, at present, unrealistic)
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From page 235... ...
inservice professional development. Despite the difficulties of assessing the cost-effectiveness of these inter ventions to improve teacher quality, the resulting analysis can offer an $7,000/4 and $9,000/4.
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From page 236... ...
ABCTE Distinguished TeacherSM Program The ABCTE is developing an advanced-level certification program that, when operational, would serve as an alternative to NBPTS certification. Since data from an operational program are not yet available, an assessment of the benefits and costs of the program must be speculative.
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From page 237... ...
At the same time, the original ABCTE Distinguished TeacherSM program offered a potential advantage on the cost side by substituting a less expensive testing process that would probably have resulted in a lower test fee than for NBPTS certification. However, it is important to consider the implications of this cost reduction in relation to the overall costs of N BPTS certification shown in Table 11-1.
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From page 238... ...
This is, of course, purely speculative, but if it were the case, it could potentially remove a severe limitation of the ABCTE Distinguished TeacherSM program as a policy lever for improving teacher quality. Note, however, that it would also move the program to becoming more similar to NBPTS certification.
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From page 239... ...
(2006) report that teachers with a master's degree produce achievement test gains similar to or slightly lower than teachers with bachelor's degrees, while the effects associated with national board certification were between 0.02 and 0.03 of a standard deviation.
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From page 240... ...
.11 It is likely, however, that this is an overestimate of the actual annual costs because teachers typically pursue graduate degrees on a part-time basis, attending courses in the evenings and during the summer. The second cost category is the cost of the time for the candidate, in this case the candidate for a master's degree.
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From page 241... ...
If we assume that the degree takes an average 1.5 years to obtain and that teachers teach 25 years after obtaining it, then the resulting cost per year for obtaining the degree is roughly $5,000 if the time for teachers to study is reimbursed, $2,500 if it is not.14 Adding to this the cost of the average annual salary bonus, the result is a rough estimate of $12,000 per year of teaching for a teacher with a master's degree if the time for teachers to study is reimbursed, $9,500 of it is not. For master's degrees, the evidence about benefits is too mixed to allow us to produce a cost-effectiveness figure that can be compared with the $1,000-$2,250 cost per 0.01 standard deviation increase in student achievement that was based on our hypothetical example of requiring all teachers to become board certified.
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From page 242... ...
And in many cases a substantial portion of those funds could be directed to salaries for those who provide professional development. It is difficult, however, to directly connect this funding to specific inservice training activities in a way that would be useful for a cost-effectiveness evaluation.
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From page 243... ...
. Superficially, the two estimates are approximately equal: NBPTS certification results in a smaller effect (0.04 versus 0.20)
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From page 244... ...
. The resulting cost-effectiveness is similar for the two interventions: $500-$2,00017 for mandatory NBPTS certification versus $1,500 for class-size reduction per 0.01 standard deviation increase per year per class.18 We caution, however, that the two interventions are not directly comparable because class-size reduction actually caused the increase, whereas the NBPTS example is hypothetical and would require additional policy actions to produce such an increase.
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From page 245... ...
investment in the NBPTS is small, representing less than 0.04 percent of the cost of K-12 education for a single year. Considering the larger goal of NBPTS, which was to transform the profession of teaching by articulating a conception of accomplished teaching and developing an assessment for identifying accomplished teaching, the $200 million (see foonote 2)
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From page 246... ...
It is important to note that this discussion about the research and development investment in the NBPTS has been stated from the perspective of the original decision 20 years ago to make a serious commitment to developing this particular vision of transforming teaching quality for K-12 education. Evaluating whether or not that initial decision two decades ago was an appropriate investment in research and development is entirely different than evaluating the current decision about whether or not to continue to invest in the program.
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From page 247... ...
It was also not possible to compare the effectiveness of the NBPTS with other mechanisms for improving teacher quality -- such as alternative kinds of advanced-certification programs for teachers, encouraging teachers to pursue master's degrees, and providing inservice professional development -- because of a lack of information on both the costs and benefits of these activities. While our cost analysis suggests that the annual per-teacher costs associated with board certification are probably lower than annual per-teacher costs of obtaining a master's degree, a sufficient number of rigorous studies was not available to allow us to compare the benefits of these two interventions in a meaningful way.
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