Assessing Accomplished Teaching Advanced-Level Certification Programs (2008) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Historical Context and Overview of the National Board
3 The Historical Context and Overview of the National Board
Pages 38-58
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From page 38... ...
We begin with a discussion of the education reform context in the United States that supported the board's creation in the late 1980s and its development during the 1990s. We then set the board's policy goals in the context of the way the field of teaching has developed and its status at the time the board was conceived.
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From page 39... ...
They would need a deeper understanding of the subject matter they would be teaching and of how knowledge is developed in the disciplines, improved understanding of how children learn and develop in different contexts, a wider repertoire of instructional strategies for reaching a diverse student population, and more varied skills for assessing students' understanding of the content and skills they had been taught. A certification program would identify those among the teaching force who had these attributes as accomplished teachers so they could be rewarded and mobilized to improve teaching and learning.
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From page 40... ...
The members of the task force regarded the plan they proposed as radical, describing its elements as "sweeping changes in education policy," which were intended to work together to create "a profession of welleducated teachers prepared to assume new powers and responsibilities to redesign schools for the future" (Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, 1986)
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From page 41... ...
Several other organizations, including the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) , for example, also adopted the goals of the task force and addressed other means of improving the quality of the teaching force.
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From page 42... ...
However, by exploring ways to make a large-scale, standardized program of performance assessments for teachers operational, the national board was breaking new ground. The national board attempted not only to redefine teaching as a profession in the public mind, but also to formally examine teaching practice in a new way that goes far beyond testing for knowledge -- by exploring student work and interactions between teachers and their students in circumstances that would be genuine but could be standardized for scoring.
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From page 43... ...
By the 1840s, the common schools, associated in particular with the name of Horace Mann, were beginning to provide a free elementary education to most of the children in a community in the same school, regardless of class; nonwhite children were still generally excluded. The 20th century saw both an expansion of educational opportunities for minority children and the expansion of required free public education to the secondary level.
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From page 44... ...
They and others have observed that the field has lacked an agreed-on base of knowledge, shared standards of excellence, and career pathways that formally reward the accumulation of skill and experience and allow teachers to progress professionally (Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, 1986; Koppich, Humphrey, and Hough, 2006; Lucas, 1999; National Research Council, 2001a)
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From page 45... ...
As employees of school districts and schools, public school teachers have comparatively little professional autonomy or control over the conditions in which they work. It is generally the case that teachers unions, rather than professional associations, protect and advance the interests of teachers, a situation that tends to reinforce teachers' status as employees, not professionals.
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From page 46... ...
Today more than 150,000 (of 2.4 million in the United States) registered nurses have obtained advanced certification through the American Nurses Credentialing Council, the American Board of Nursing Specialties, and the American Nurses Association.
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From page 47... ...
We note also that the goal of professionalizing teaching was articulated by the Carnegie task force and the national board at a time when professionalization was a topical concern in other fields as well. Other fields had been pushing to join the ranks of professions; a 1964 article identified social work, veterinary medicine, school teaching, nursing, and pharmacy, among others, as "in process" [of becoming professions]
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From page 48... ...
. NCATE describes itself as "part of a continuum of teacher preparation and development that begins with pre-service preparation, and continues with stages of teacher licensure and advanced professional development, including National Board certification" (http://www.ncate.org/)
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From page 49... ...
offered by the ETS was the principal instrument available for assessing t eachers' competence, but it was widely viewed as too simplistic to effectively identify teachers of high quality. Moreover, the NTE was an assessment for teachers entering the profession and not intended to certify experienced teachers with advanced skills.
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From page 50... ...
For example, medical schools had been using Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE) to appraise medical students' clinical skills, such as communication, clinical examination, medical procedures, prescribing, and interpretation of results -- often using actors as patients in simulated clinical situations.
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From page 51... ...
The board posited (National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, 1999, p.
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From page 52... ...
This concept became a cornerstone of the board's vision of accomplished teaching. In 1993, the assessments for the first certificate were ready, and the first set of teachers earned board certification during the 1993-1994 school year.
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From page 53... ...
3. Teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning: • teachers call on multiple methods to meet their goals; • teachers orchestrate learning in group settings; • teachers place a premium on student engagement; • teachers regularly assess student progress; and • teachers are mindful of their principal objectives.
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From page 54... ...
A more recent influence on policy discussions of teacher quality has been the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Among the act's provisions is the requirement that all public school teachers of core subjects (which includes reading, math, science, history, and geography, among others)
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From page 55... ...
The goal of privatizing public education, advanced primarily by politically conservative groups, has included an effort to expand responsibility for the preparation of teachers beyond the traditional providers, schools and colleges of education (see, e.g., Friedman, 1995; Zeichner, 2003) , and has also created alternate routes to teaching, which some observers claim have watered down the standards for entering teachers (Walsh and Jacobs, 2007)
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From page 56... ...
THE POLICY CONTEXT The planning and development of the national board occurred at a time when the value of challenging and meaningful standards for students was being recognized as a critical strategy for education reform. The logic behind the national board's strategy was to set high standards for teachers as a means for improving teacher quality and, hence, student learning.
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From page 57... ...
Moreover, since the national board began its work, questions and debate regarding issues related to its mission -- about teacher quality and preparation, teacher salaries and incentives, the influence of teachers unions, and the potential value of a range of approaches to reforming public education and improving student achievement, to name a few -- have continued
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From page 58... ...
The national board continues to conduct its work in a complex environment, a factor we have borne in mind as we conducted our evaluation.
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