The teacher accreditations and certifications set forth by the No Child Left Behind Act are ineffective at increasing teacher efficacy, according to a new paper from the Brookings Institution co-authored by Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Staiger.
Some schools also use accreditations as a structure for pay increases, but teachers with these qualifications are no better at increasing test scores than those who have not been certified.
Staiger, who has worked on similar education policy-related questions before, used data from the Los Angeles school district to determine that students with accredited teachers did not receive higher test scores than students whose teachers lacked accreditation.
"The answer to all of those comparisons," Staiger said, "is that certification is essentially unrelated to their effectiveness in the classroom."
Staiger has also compared scores from students of certified teachers to scores of students whose teachers are in the Teach For America program, which places recent college graduates as teachers in low-income schools without going through a certification process. Efficacy was about the same in that instance too, Staiger said.
The score gap between students of the most effective teachers and students of the least effective teachers was significant, though, amounting to about 10 percentile points on tests.
"All these qualifications and even a year of teacher experience [raise scores] a couple of percentiles at most," Staiger said, but no other factor was related to such a consistently large difference in scores.
Staiger and his co-authors offered several suggestions for policy, including changing the standards for offering teachers tenure and instituting a bonus program for the teachers who have proven to be most effective. The money for the program would come from the federal government.
Such monetary incentives might encourage teacher cheating, Staiger says, which would ideally be offset by using other tools, like principal evaluations or parent surveys, to determine which teachers would receive bonuses.
"Cheating I think is a small issue," Staiger said. "The bigger concern is that you distort [teaching] in general, focusing purely on the skills for this narrow test you're giving. There's always isolated instances of cheating."
Many students who plan to participate in Teach for America or become teachers right away will not receive accreditation. Andrea Palmer '08 plans to become certified eventually but will likely apply for a Teach for America position before she receives accreditation. Palmer, who is not an education major or minor, believes that her four years of experience teaching French and art at a children's museum will go further in the classroom than a certificate from an accreditation program.
"I do think it's true that being a good teacher has more to do with your natural personality than classes you take," Palmer said, "and I'm good with kids...I don't think [classes] are going to make someone who would not otherwise be a good teacher a good one."
Staiger is pushing for students like Palmer to enter the classroom.
"Rather than requiring teachers to jump through hoops that are unrelated to their effectiveness in the classroom, we're going to let many people try it out and after a year or two we're going to see," Staiger said. "If they prove to be effective, they can keep at it."
