ABCTE Teachers Performing Well, Aside From the ABCs....

Some interesting new findings were released last week about the effectiveness of teachers certified by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE).

ABCTE provides an alternate, test-based certification for mid-career professionals who want to enter teaching but don't want to endure the cost and the pain of taking countless hours of education courses. Such“fast track” alternate certification programs are hotly contested by critics who fear that unqualified teachers may be placed in our country’s classrooms. Despite the documented success of alternate programs like Teach for America, traditional ed school folks continue to defend teacher education programs as the only acceptable form of teacher training. (Disclosure: I taught for two years in Colorado with an alternate license and helped develop the social studies component of the ABCTE test).

Last week ABCTE released findings from a study* of elementary school teachers in Tennessee who passed the ABCTE tests. But while the overall findings look positive for ABCTE (despite the small sample of 55 teachers analyzed) student reading scores are a potential source of concern.

To conduct the study, researchers gave the two ABCTE tests (one for subject matter knowledge, one for knowledge of teaching skills) to a group of classroom teachers and compared the performance of students taught by teachers who passed both exams to that of students taught by teachers who failed at least one. On average, students of passing teachers had a B+ grade point average (3.36 on a 4.0 scale) compared to a C or 2.0 average earned by students of teachers who didn't pass.

This may underestimate the value of the ABCTE process, since the teachers in the study were given far less time to prepare for the exam than those who normally take the tests. It wasn’t too long ago that I was pouring over my teacher’s manuals and old AP study guides in preparation for my own licensure exam, grateful for the time I spent reviewing the British Civil Wars prior to its unveiling as the essay topic.

Yet while these preliminary results suggest ABCTE may be helpful in identifying good new math, science, and social studies teachers, the results for reading were far less encouraging. Math, science, and social studies results for students taught by passing teachers were two letter grades higher than for failing teachers. Reading results were not; students of passing and non-passing teachers alike had the same low average of 2.0.

This is disconcerting considering that the majority of teachers in the study hold a teaching license and over half hold masters degrees. All elementary teachers should know how to teach reading, but this suggests many don't. However, given that only the results for math were statistically significant, further analysis with a larger sample size is necessary to see if the low reading scores for ABCTE certified teachers are anything to raise a stink about.

Interestingly, ABCTE also offers a reading endorsement for certified elementary teachers, yet no information has been provided on the correlation between passing rates on the reading endorsement exam and student outcomes. Until such results are made available to contradict the ABCTE study, it seems ABCTE reading standards and candidate performance may require a second look.

-Posted by Margaret Price

*This post originally stated that Mathematica had conducted this study. In fact, they are doing the longitudinal evaluation; this study was done by Josh Boots at ABCTE. Sorry for anyconfusion.