By John Thompson.

Even as I tried to distance myself from the computer over the holiday season, edu-politics kept drawing me back. Since my book, A Teacher’s Tale, has been released, I reread the manuscript’s my first draft. Mostly, I did so to revisit the stories of students that were edited out, but I also stumbled across accounts of issues that I previously avoided when blogging. I also sought to come clean on mistakes I’d made that were cut from the manuscript. Fortunately, none were as indefensible as the unforced errors that were caused by corporate reformers’ micromanaging of worlds that they knew nothing about.

As the Gates Foundation’s “teacher quality” initiatives collapse, the obvious question is why did they attempt to reinvent the wheel. Why did they not invest in scaling up National Board (NBPTS) teacher certification? Since I’m a NBPTS washout, my endorsement of that program is pretty unbiased. The process was enormously valuable to me and I was not punished by failing to pass its tests. The national certification process also produced a great record of my students’ experiences during my training. So, this post will get my constructive criticisms with the NBPTS grading out of the way so that subsequent posts can focus on my students.

I fell 39 points short of earning NBPTS certification. I took consolation in the numbers showing that it wasn’t so much the evidence of my instructional quality that brought my score down. The tests on knowledge of subject matters had cost me 77.63 points. Then and now, it seemed clear to me that I had more academic knowledge about those subjects than the test-makers did but maybe I, the historian, and they, the education test-makers, spoke past each other. So, I might as well get my big, systematic concern out of the way, while touching on my complaint about questions and answers regarding educational expertise.

Then and now, it is hard for the education profession to admit that equally great teaching looks very different in high-performing as opposed to low-performing schools. Moreover, most teachers do not work in extremely high-challenge schools, so many or most (and most test graders?) have limited knowledge of the circumstances that undermine instruction in the most at-risk schools.

My scores on the lessons in the type of classes that most educators would recognize were 3.00 and 3.25 on a scale from 1.00 to 4.00. My scores on lessons for the lowest-skilled classes ranged from 1.00 to 2:00. To earn national certification, two classes were videotaped. My videotaped senior class was flawed but impressive and it received a grade of 3.00. My friends who viewed my highest-challenge freshman class agreed that I did a better job when teaching the more struggling class. That lesson received a grade of 2.00.

Again, I’m not interested in criticizing NBPTS. I suspect it is a far better system than the current professional development and the evaluation systems pushed by the Gates Foundation. If the NBPTS wasn’t able to adequately distinguish between the challenges of teaching in lower-challenge and the highest-challenge classes, how would the corporate reformers’ models hope to do so?

Also, rereading my NBPTS entry about lessons for “Making Real-World Connections” at a distance of seventeen years, it seemed to clearly embody my greatest strength as an inner city teacher – being able to motivate students and link academic concepts to the students’ real world, and to do so in a language they could understand. Rereading the application at such a distance, I kept asking why I had not featured those lessons for my video. They utilized every learning style, as we used sound, sight, hands-on, group learning, emotion, and discussion. I later videotaped one of the same lessons and, when graded by my peers, I was chosen first runner-up for the district Teacher of the Year. Another of those lessons was used when I was named the Oklahoma History Teacher of the Year.

Then I noted the grade from the NBPTS, a 1.125. Next, while searching for the reason why I received the lowest possible score of 1.00 on the Instructional Design component, I realized what my problem had been. Not knowing that the test would be graded by the College Board, I had not paid enough attention to their terminology, and its distinctions between “domains” and “component,” and “objectives” and “goals.” I had used the term “objective” as if it was synonymous with “the main idea.” My prose had been clear, consistent, and defensible, but I sure had not made the distinction that the College Board made between “domain” and “group.”

The last NBPTS exercise was a computerized test on knowledge of subject matters. Of course, I was completely confident in my knowledge base, and I had never suffered from writer’s block, which would be the only way I could get a low grade on that part of the test. It looked like I was doubly lucky on this assessment. The first question was a description of four main themes of the 18th Century in English History. I had earned a B+ in a graduate seminar on that subject with the famous historian Lawrence Stone at Princeton. The College Board determined that my “Depth of Knowledge” of the 18th century was “minimal.”

It also looked like I was lucky with the other topic, teaching the social origins of the Okie Movement. My book on the subject, Closing the Frontier, received the Western Historical Association’s Atherton Award, the organization’s most prestigious prize for a work of modern history. And, as I have explained, I had plenty of experience refining that knowledge in order to successfully teach the subject on a high school level. The College Board determined that I had “little or no knowledge” of the subject, giving me the lowest possible score, 1.00.

On the other hand, this was the first time that History had been a tested NBPTS subject, so mistakes were inevitable. Moreover, the process allowed teachers to videotape multiple classes and submit the two best entries. It was not their fault that our school soon suffered its fourth and fifth deaths of students or recent alumni in that year, and the school melted down, making it impossible to re-tape those lessons. My feelings were hurt by the board’s judgment, but I could have continued to improve my scores during the next school year. It was not the fault of the NBPTS that I chose to invest my time in system-wide reform so that schools might not have to endure the challenges we faced during that year which our long-suffering principal dubbed “the Year from Hell.”

Being denied National Certification was the greatest disappointment in my career. It was far more upsetting than the blow when I did not initially pass my oral examination at Rutgers, or when my book manuscript received a negative peer review. I was stunned – for about four hours. At the age of 46, my greatest setback was being rejected by the NBPTS? How could I look in the faces of my students, who had suffered so much trauma, and then crybaby about this minor injustice? Subsequent posts will address those challenges overcome by my students in the two videotaped lessons.

What do you think? What were your experiences with National Certification? How has it changed since 1998?