I am a National Board Certified Teacher. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) influenced a big chunk of my professional life and practice, and I remain—pretty much—a fan.

The founding ideas around the creation of an assessment that identified accomplished teaching drew me in, back in the mid-90s. I wasn’t sure, back then, that there could ever be a valid, reliable way to evaluate quality—or inadequate—teaching. I thought it was like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s remark about hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it.

Remember—this was before NCLB, and the advent of mandated testing for all public school children, beginning in the third grade. Some states (mine, for example) had been using statewide assessments for years, but nobody was talking about identifying or comparing teacher effectiveness by their students’ test scores– a ridiculous thought, given all the variables.

I was intrigued by the NBPTS process, and signed up to sit for certification as an Early Adolescence Generalist, paying my own fee ($2500, if I remember correctly) and (kind of recklessly) jumping in. The National Board, in 1995, did not offer an assessment for music teachers, so I decided to teach my 300 middle school band students ‘generalist’ lessons in math, language arts, science and social studies. I would NEVER recommend this, knowing what I learned, but I scored well and became a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT).

Most people, including ed policy experts, university educators and teachers who have not experienced certification do not fully understand the National Board process (although many think they do). It’s difficult to explain, especially to educators and researchers whose entire careers have been shadowed by our national love affair with standardized testing.

The National Board asks teachers to hold their practice up to a set of teacher-created pedagogical and content-based standards, custom-written for various disciplinary and developmental levels. Teachers then reflect on how well their practice aligns with these standards, using videotapes of lessons, student work products across time and written self-evaluation. They also sit for on-demand examinations of their relevant content knowledge. Candidates’ portfolios and content exams were scored by teachers who taught the same subjects, at the same level.

It’s rigorous, and grueling—and often confusing for teachers who have never been asked the deep questions posed by the process: What is your convincing evidence that Student A understands ____? What misconceptions are evident in Student B’s remarks about ______? What other strategies have you tried to build competence in ________? Why is it important for students to have fluency in ______________? And so on, 12-20 pages for each of multiple portfolio tasks.

Many teachers—myself included—say that going through the National Board process was the best, most useful and personalized, professional development they ever had. I became a true-blue believer in the process. I then worked as a Teacher in Residence for NBPTS for two years and was part of a national team that devised the music assessment.

I was working for the National Board in their Outreach and Teacher Leadership departments when NCLB passed, 25 years ago. You could immediately see how NCLB’s foregrounding standardized testing would clash with the things most valued by the NBPTS principles and standards (again, established by actual teachers, not lawmakers, data-crunchers or education publishers).

The NBPTS standards were built on the idea of teacher expertise—knowing their students deeply, mastery of their subject discipline, possession of a full pedagogical tool bag—and continuous reflection on evidence of what was going well and what needed changing in their day to day practice.

NCLB, on the other hand, put faith in test scores as the only valid means of comparing schools (and, eventually, teachers)–and allocating carrots and sticks. There were lots of new rules to follow: the Highly Qualified Teacher requirements, for example, wiped out my NB certificate (Early Adolescence Generalist) which honored the classic middle-grades teacher who taught all subjects.

NBPTS was in the process of rolling out a number of new certificates, recruiting teachers to sit for certification, and building financial rewards for NBCTs into state policy and local contracts. They were becoming more corporate, changing a number of policies to streamline the business, something they probably needed to do to stay alive in the new political milieu.

One of the things that was proposed: machine scoring of teacher portfolios and/or content exams. NBCTs were adamantly opposed to the very idea. Many NBCTs, having had the positive experience of going through the process, had become scorers (a job only practicing teachers were allowed to do) in the summer. Others became candidate support providers, working with colleagues to examine their practice, building little communities that studied the standards, videotaping each other’s lessons and having productive conversations about teaching and learning.

The thought of saving money by machine-scoring parts of the assessment was a betrayal of the teacher leadership piece of NB certification—helping colleagues to understand and improve their own practice. Who would embrace an assessment that was evaluated by a bot?  Not teachers whose work had been fairly judged. The National Board later eliminated their Teacher Leadership department. It was not a money-maker.

I left the National Board when they moved to Washington, DC, and returned to my music classroom, but continued, for a while, to help candidates and do workshops with schools or teacher associations that were interested in the NBPTS process. I have many NBCT friends who still do NB work, in spite of changes to NB certification that were less than teacher-friendly. I am now an outside—albeit informed—observer.

Recently, on a candidate support page, the question of using AI to write portfolio briefs emerged. A candidate had shared a draft analysis of her own teaching to an NBCT, who worried that the piece was so ‘well-written’ that it appeared to be composed by ChatGPT. The NBCT encouraged the candidate to think about ways that might make her writing seem more… human.

Now—writing skill is NOT assessed in the National Board process. Clarity of thought, presentation of believable evidence, convincing analysis of student progress—all of these are important, but smooth prose and impeccable syntax, not so much. I was struck by the idea that someone might think about using AI to write what’s supposed to be one’s own rationale and justification for things done as a teacher. The product could only be incoherent, if grammatically sound, slop.

Even worse—and here we have to, unsurprisingly, travel to Texas—some states are now questioning the National Board’s core contribution to teaching and learning: professional standards.

As Peter Greene reports:

 NBTC hasn’t been hugely successful in Texas– only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that’s 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because “tolerance.”

That’s correct. The NBPTS standards, for all ages and subjects, encourage equity and inclusion of all kids and embrace the diverse range of students taught in American public schools. In Texas, they’re trying to yank the very modest stipends given to TX teachers who have achieved National Board Certification.

Because money talks. Not all states offer a financial reward to NBCTs or contribute to certification fees. And many NBCTs are like me—curious about defining the markers of good teaching, convinced that all kids deserve an accomplished teacher. The money is seldom enough to make the 200-400 hour intensive challenge of certification worthwhile.

In earlier days, NBPTS got a lot of bipartisan support—a way to reward hard-working, demonstrably effective teachers that wasn’t graduate credit hours or seniority. Right to work states were fans of paying a handful of excellent teachers a little more cash, knowing that teachers are capitalists, too.

It’s ironic that it might be right-wing politics and AI that damage a worthwhile endeavor to improve teaching. Or maybe the word is predictable.