Teacher Pay, Board Certification, and the Unspoken Impact on High-Poverty Schools

A new Op-Ed in The State calls for retaining the stipend SC pays for National Board Certification. While I concur with the need to pay teachers well, and to recognize excellence in teaching, I find the constant misrepresentation of board certification research trouble, and I find the silence over the negative impact of board certification on high-poverty schools unacceptable.

Originally published as:

Thomas, P. L. (2008, June 30). Teaching credential hasn't been shown to be cost-effective education investment. The Greenville News.

See my original Op-Ed included below:

Headlines and lead paragraphs heralding a new study on the effectiveness of National Board certified teachers appear to vindicate SC’s financial and pedagogical commitment to the process.

“Board-certified teachers boost student scores” headlines this lead from USA Today: “Schools looking to hire teachers should keep an eye out for those with national board certification.”

And “National-Board Teachers Found to Be Effective” draws the readers of Education Week to this: “Teachers who earn advanced certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards are more effective than teachers without that credential, but there’s little evidence to show the program has transformed the field in the broader ways its founders envisioned, a long-awaited report released today by a national scientific panel finds.”

Welcomed news for SC where we have committed large yearly stipends and resources to support teachers applying to the board certification process, right?

Not quite. The first problem related to this study is the careless reporting of the conclusions. Read further in both of the stories above and discover that the research, in fact, does not conclude what the headlines and lead paragraphs suggest.

In the forth paragraph of the USA Today piece we discover: “It is not clear from the research whether the process of getting certified by the national board makes teachers better or if those who get certified were already top performers, according to the report. More research is needed to try to determine that, Hakel said.”

Education Week discredits its own claims in the third paragraph: “In the new report, however, a 17-member panel of the National Research Council says it’s still unclear whether the process itself leads to better-quality teaching, because too few studies have examined that issue.”

In SC, we must look carefully at the report because we committed to board certification without any evidence that the investment actually addresses educational needs in SC.

The National Research Council report offers these tentative implications:

• While the report claims higher standardized test scores for students taught by board certified teachers, when compared to non-board certified, it also admits that this study in no way can be viewed as generalizable since the data come from only two states and one city, and draw on just reading and math scores for 3^rd and 5^th graders.

• Most important is this key statement from the report itself: “There are no studies that collected baseline data about teachers before going through the process, making it impossible to attribute any findings to the process itself.” This study suggests some very narrow correlations about board certification and test scores, but it does not show that board certification causes anything—at all. It is possible that students would have scored higher in the board certified teachers’ classrooms before those teachers became board certified—or for a number of other reasons the study never addresses.

• Also key for us in SC is that the report reveals absolutely no conclusions about the cost effectiveness of board certification. This report does not clarify if the money invested in board certification produces student achievement equal to or greater than the money spent. Now, we are left wondering if the significant financial cost to SC is producing what we need.

• Board certified teachers are more likely to change schools or positions than non-board certified teachers, and those moves tend to be to schools that already include higher student achievement and lower poverty. Board certification contributes to teacher flight from the schools that need high-quality teachers and to schools that are already successful and include students experiencing fewer life challenges.

• Teachers from affluent schools tend to apply for board certification at higher rates than teachers from high-poverty schools.

• While African-American teachers apply at the same rates as whites, African-American teachers are under-represented in those who complete certification.

With our commitment to board certification, SC made a leap of faith when we should have been making evidence-based decisions.

Let’s not make a mistake again by jumping to distorted conclusions, as the media appears to be doing, about this single study from the National Research Council.

Issues of poverty, equity, and funding are plaguing our teaching workforce and our schools. This report does not show board certification as an appropriate solution to those problems. In fact, the report suggests that board certification could be working against our overcoming these difficult obstacles.

Do teachers in SC who pursue professional growth deserve our support? Of course.

The key question we must ask: Is board certification the appropriate mechanism for better compensating teachers and raising student achievement? The answer appears to be we have no clear evidence to say “yes,” but now have some signs that the answer may be “no.”

Choice and Charters, not all that is claimed (especially for the poor)

How School Choice Can Create Jobs for South Carolina, authored by Sven Larson, has been advocated by the South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation, claiming that choice in the low country of SC produced jobs for the area.

But, a review for the Think Tank Review Project by Joydeep Roy of Georgetown University and the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., found that the claims are flawed and the report is more advocacy than research.

Further, a new study on the impact of charter schools, "Schools Without Diversity: Education Management Organizations, Charter Schools, and the Demographic Stratification of the American School System," reveals that, "as compared with the public school district in which the charter school resided, the charter schools were substantially more segregated by race, wealth, disabling condition, and language. While charter schools have rapidly grown, the strong segregative pattern found in 2001 is virtually unchanged through 2007."

These findings, I regret, will likely stay below the radar of mainstream media and most people and continue the patterns found by Molnar and Yettick regarding the reporting of credible research v. advocacy reports—advocacy receiving a disproportionate amount of coverage leading to more misinformation about schools (and choice) than credible information.

Leonard Pitts on Bauer

Public silence greets poor's powerlessness

New piece in Journal of Educational Controversy

I have a new piece in JEC addressing teacher education, but in part I also consider the failure of deficit perspectives; see the piece at the link embedded in this excerpt:

"For example, let’s consider briefly one aspect of when teacher education has addressed transformative practices—teaching children from lives in poverty. For more than a decade, colleges of education along with standards for accreditation and requirements for certification have addressed diversity as a central aspect of teacher education, of being a teacher. Recent scholarship on this concern for diversity and the achievement gap among races and socioeconomic groups has shown that when we attempt institutional approaches to critical issues, the result is corrupted by the system itself, resulting in a widespread acceptance of the work of Ruby Payne (1996), work that has no cited research supporting the “framework” and work that reinforces the assumptions (deficit thinking) about race and diversity that are common in our society (Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2008; Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2009; Dudley-Marling, 2007; Gorski, 2006a; Gorski, 2006b; Gorski, 2008; Thomas, 2009."

26 January 2010 Op-Ed in The State

Bauer's comments reflect our own misconceptions

Andre Bauer believes government assistance for the poor has the same intent and pitfalls as feeding stray animals, something he learned from the folk wisdom passed down by his grandmother.

Bauer's comments in part are the result of a common error made by many speakers—just because you can make an analogy doesn't make that comparison valid. But more important than his rhetorical flaw is that Bauer is both demonstrably wrong and a stark reflection of how we view and treat poor children in public schools in SC and across the nation.

When we look at and listen to Bauer, the reality is "we have met the enemy and he is us," especially in terms of how we view and treat poor children in our schools.

Two powerful cultural myths, also misconceptions, drive Bauer's comments and assumptions running through our school system.

First, we are people driven by faith in the rugged individual, touting the honor and promise of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, demonstrates that success often comes from hard work. But more importantly, Gladwell shows that success is hard work in the context of great fortune.

Many bright, gifted, and hardworking people fail, through no fault of their own, while other people, often not as gifted or tenacious, succeed. Gladwell does not discount hard work; in fact, he shows that it is crucial to success, but he does dispel the rugged individual myth by exposing the cultural context that often creates the possibility for success and failure in any person's life.

Bill Gate's genius needed the fortune of time and place to flourish; neither his genius nor his drive were enough without context and good luck.

The inverse of our belief in rugged individualism is our acceptance of a culture of poverty. Many trace the term "culture of poverty" to Oscar Lewis in the early 1960s, but the popular view of this concept is at best debatable and at worst provably wrong.

Briefly, the culture of poverty myth is flawed because it reduces a class of people to a single stereotype—as if all poverty and all people living in poverty are one type. This is untrue for any economic condition. As well, the popular view of a culture of poverty as expressed by Bauer has shifted the cultural dimension of the theory—focusing on the power of the culture to overwhelm or support distinct classes of people—to blaming the poor for being poor, with the implication that financial success and failure are somehow inherently within each person.

The second part of Bauer's comment—"You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better"—at least implies that the poor are inherently incapable of thought, that they are deficient, unlike people who succeed in our society.

And here is where Bauer's comments hit home with our schools. This deficit perspective of the poor is exactly how we view and teach children from poor homes in SC.

We have for years now invested large amounts of taxpayer money in unscientific programs, notably the work of Ruby Payne, to teach educators workbook approaches to teaching the poor. And these programs do little more than reinforce inaccurate stereotypes of poor children and families, further justifying for educators the reduced curriculum and instruction that we offer those children who need our schools the most.

In the first few years of schooling, we label children (correlated strongly with the economic status of their families), and these labels stick throughout their education.

Once children are labeled "deficient," they receive the narrowest possible education. They are placed in classes with higher student/teacher ratios than their "gifted" peers; they are assigned the least qualified and least experienced teachers.

And they are offered worksheets, memorization, basal readers, and rote behaviors (with the most authoritarian classroom management as well) because we assume, as Bauer does, "[t]hey don't know any better." The result is a cumulative 12 or more years of training a group of students to be cooperative based on the flawed assumption that they are somehow responsible for the economic conditions of their families and are likely incapable of doing anything more substantial.

Yes, Andre Bauer is wrong in his characterization of the poor, but the outrage aimed at his comments rings hollow because we have allowed the same perspectives to drive our schools for a century with very few questioning deficit assumptions that reduce children to what they lack at the expense of basic human dignity.

Another embarrassment for SC

I find this disturbing in many ways, and upsetting.

But a serious candidate for governor and current lieutenant governor has made comments that reveal how far we have to go in our quest to understanding poverty:

He made these comments recently:

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals," Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. "You know why? Because they breed.

"You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."

MLK Jr Day

In honor of MLK Jr Day, we should never forget the craft and message of King's words:

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail"