APS boasts; 5th in the nation in new Nationally Board Certified teachers - so what?

It is possible for teachers to earn a National Board Certification, link, in teaching.  It is an arduous process and those who succeed are to be commended. 

APS is rich in nationally certified teachers but would be hard pressed to produce any empirical data that all of them together have had any significant impact on APS students overall.

If you search for research on the correlation between the presence of nationally certified teachers in a district and the overall success of the district, you won't find a definitive answer - it is a complex dynamic.  On a classroom by classroom basis, there is more convincing evidence of its value.

Overall you will find some consensus; link,

students with otherwise similar teachers made larger gains if their teacher had a NBC

Which begs a fair question,

If APS has more than its fair share of nationally certified teachers, why aren't APS students (in general) more successful?

It would appear that, though we are paying for the national board certifications, we are not making good use of them.

The more a teacher's job is to deliver a packaged curriculum; every student on the same page in the same book at the same time, the more the teacher's own talent, skills, or certifications are buried in the rigamarole and the more insignificant the become.

In particular, if these teachers qualifications cannot be applied district wide, as opposed to only in their own classroom, there cannot be any real expectation of district wide change or improvement.

Nationally certified teachers have no more impact district wide than teachers who haven't earned certification.  Like "normal" teachers, nationally certified teachers have no seat at the table where the really important decisions get made.  A sack lunch with the Supt, link, is not a seat at the table where decisions are made.

Just like teachers in general, nationally certified teachers have no voice in the development of the policies and procedures that influence the likelihood of successfully educating children.  They have no power to make an significant change and therefore no opportunity to significantly change and nor significantly improve anything.

All of the education, training and experience that effective and efficient decision making should be drawing upon, resides in classrooms spread all over the district.  The leadership of the APS has made no effort to enable meaningful participation by teachers in the decision making process - quite the contrary, they've done everything they can to consolidate all decision making power under their own roof.

The home of all decision making power in APS

It is arrogant to suppose that a handful of people and a guy who hasn't taught in thirty years, know more about what is wrong in APS and how to fix it than thousands of teachers with tens of thousands of years of current and ongoing teaching experience, yet there they are.

It's a shame that the Journal won't investigate and report upon the professional lives of APS teachers, both certified and not.  It would make interesting reading.




photos Mark Bralley