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At a recent reception in the august Mansfield Room in the the U.S. Capitol celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), Ron Thorpe, the new President and CEO of NBPTS, compared the Board certification that almost every physician earns in order to practice medicine to the status and importance of Board certification for teachers in K-12 classrooms.  He specifically asked if we’d be willing to send our child (or grandchild) into surgery if the physician doing the work wasn’t Board certified in his or her field.  Of course, none of us is willing to send a loved one into the operating theatre under the care of a surgeon who is not Board certified, so why should we be willing to send our children to schools with teachers who may or may not be skilled in their practice? 

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards was established twenty-five years ago with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and under the leadership of then North Carolina governor, James Hunt.  The Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy’s Task Force on Teaching as a Profession released A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21^st Century that recommended setting national standards for the professional certification of teachers.  From the beginning, NBPTS has been committed to supporting teacher leadership and to that end the majority of the NBPTS Board of Directors are teachers involved in the decision-making around the standards for the profession.  Today, nearly 100,000 educators have achieved National Board Certification. Fifty-five percent of the nation’s NBCTs teach in high-need schools.

NBPTS believes every child deserves an accomplished teacher, and the standards and certification define and measure teaching excellence.  The standards are based on Five Core Propositions that form the foundation of knowledge, skills, dispositions and beliefs that characterize all accomplished teachers—

• Teachers are committed to students and their learning
• Teacher know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects to students
• Teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning
• Teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience
• Teachers are members of learning communities

All 16 member organizations of the Learning First Alliance, including and especially both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), support the important work of the NBPTS.  And, as a nation, if we’re serious about the essential role strong public schools play in the future of our country and indeed the world, we should be able to lead the effort to ensure that every teacher becomes Board certified.  If we’re unwilling to let a physician who is not Board certified operate on our young peoples’ bodies, we should surely not be willing to let teachers who have not exhibited their skills and honed their practice through achieving Board certification operate on the cognitive and emotional development and well-being of our children and young people.

Photo by U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gary Granger Jr. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons