National Board Teachers No Better Than Other Educators, Long-Awaited Study Finds

Students of teachers who hold certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards achieve, on average, no greater academic progress than students of teachers without the special status, a long-awaited study using North Carolina data concludes.

The study—conducted by William L. Sanders, the statistician who pioneered the concept of "value-added" analysis of teaching effectiveness—found that there was basically no difference in the achievement levels of students whose teachers earned the prestigious NBPTS credential, those who tried but failed to earn it, those who never tried to get the certification, or those who earned it after the student test-score data was collected.

"The amount of variability among teachers with the same NBPTS certification status is considerably greater than the differences between teachers of different status," says the report. The study examined more than 35,000 student records and more than 800 teachers in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County...