Great expectations.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is providing unparalleled leadership and innovation in the field of teaching. Not only have we "changed the conversation" about the teaching profession, as William Lowe Boyd and Jillian Reese note ("Great Expectations," features, Spring 2006), but we are building market demand in American education by insisting on excellence that is tied to student learning.

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We agree that more must be done to maximize the value of National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) as instructional leaders in schools, particularly in high-needs schools. Thirty-six percent of teachers who achieved National Board certification in 2005 work in Title I schools. We are working hard to increase that percentage. Over the past year, boards in at least five states have forged efforts to attract accomplished teachers to high-needs schools.

Maximizing the influence of NBCTs, Boyd and Reese assert, make National Board certification more cost-effective. We believe it already is. Capital funding for the development of the NBPTS assessment actually totaled approximately $100 million, a significantly smaller amount than the authors assert. After taking account of the many positive effects of National Board certification, one can only conclude that it has been and will be an exceedingly valuable investment in U.S. public education.

JOSEPH A. AGUERREBERE

President and CEO 

National Board for Professional

Teaching Standards

William Boyd and Jillian Reese have provided an excellent and balanced account of the relatively short history of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. But I would disagree with their premise that there was no demand from policymakers and the public for a means to pay accomplished teachers more than ordinary teachers.

For more than 100 years policymakers have advanced numerous merit-pay schemes. All failed because there was no means to measure performance that all parties could support. The key to this failure was cheap, primitive teacher-evaluation systems that failed fundamental tests of reliability and validity and, therefore, could not allow for differential rewards for teachers. The National Board devised such a measurement system that, while expensive, gained the support of teachers, administrators, and policymakers.

Evidently teachers and their unions were willing, even happy, to have some teachers earn more as long as everyone could trust the basis of differentiation. Needless to say, this is a major development. In the process, the NBPTS gave the lie to the professionally crippling belief that excellence in teaching is idiosyncratic and impossible to identify.

Now the embryonic teaching profession's advanced certification system faces a challenge unlike that faced by other established professions, many of which are using some of the very assessment procedures now being used by the NBPTS. But these other certification processes do not require external evidence of candidate impact on patients or clients. (Just how sick were the patients treated by this particular candidate for specialist certification?) Critics have set a bar for the NBPTS certification process that has never been set for other certification processes. Designing a certification process that reliably, validly and fairly produces external validation of the impact of the candidate on students erects a bar that has not been set by any other profession for its certification process.

I fully agree with the authors and the critics that ways must be found to broaden the impact of board-certified teachers. And schools must be radically restructured to take advantage of the capacities of accomplished teachers. The National Board has legitimized differentiation of teachers. Now we must break down the egg-crate organization of the schools to enable board-certified teachers to assume new roles and responsibilities.

ARTHUR E. WISE

President

National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education