Board Games - failure of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to accomplish objective of improving quality of teaching in the US

National Review, August 9, 1999 by Danielle Dunne Wilcox, Chester E. Finn Jr.

Why have otherwise-sensible business leaders and elected officials been taken in? Maybe they're wired to favor "comprehensive solutions" and "master plans." Perhaps they've been lulled by frequent repetition of the word "standards." Relying on advisors who frequently hail from the ranks of the school establishment, these busy people may not have peered beneath the appealing rhetoric or challenged the soothing assurances. Or possibly they cannot imagine what else to do.

Finally, though, some resistance to the board is developing. More than 50 education leaders have signed a manifesto called "The Teachers We Need and How to Get More of Them." The manifesto's commonsense approach? States should insist on subject knowledge but otherwise open up entry into teaching. Let the market generate both quality and quantity. Decentralize personnel decisions to individual schools and empower them to pay teachers what they're worth. Then hold schools accountable for their results, with teacher performance judged by what students learn.

That's the approach Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge and his secretary of education, Eugene Hickok, are taking. Ridge and Hickok want both to raise academic standards for teacher-preparation programs and to open an "alternative route" into the public-school classroom for well- educated individuals who don't want to tarry in ed school. Ridge and Hickok have developed the nation's most promising strategy for redefining what it means and what it takes to become a teacher. But the Pennsylvania branch of the National Education Association and the state association of teacher colleges recently sought an injunction to prevent the reforms from taking effect, arguing that by licensing teachers without "training as professional educators" the reforms "have demeaned and devalued the public school teaching profession."

The public schools could learn from private and charter schools in how they regard teacher quality. Those schools live in a marketplace, not a bureaucracy. They hire the best people they can find. They're not wowed by ed-school diplomas. They pay what the market signals they must, to get the people they want. They judge a teacher's effectiveness primarily by pupil achievement. That's what happens when schools are held accountable for their results.

And that's what business leaders would do if they were actually running a school. Will they ever learn?