The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, NBPTS, was created in 1987 after the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy's Task Force on Teaching as a Profession released A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. The report called for the National Board to "establish high and rigorous standards for what teachers need to know and be able to do, and to certify teachers who meet the standards." The Carnegie task force stated: "The key to success lies in creating a profession equal to the task - a profession of well-educated teachers prepared to assume new powers and responsibilities to redesign schools for the future." The task force urged the teaching profession to set the standards and certify teachers who meet the standards.

Those suggestions brought the nation's educational community together to create the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The National Board is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan and nongovernmental organization governed by a 63-member board of directors, a majority of whom are classroom teachers. The other directors include school administrators, school board leaders, governors and state legislators, higher education officials, and business and community leaders.

The mission of the NBPTS is to establish high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do, to develop and operate a national voluntary system to assess and certify teachers who meet the standards, and to advance related education reforms for the purpose of improving student learning in American schools.

Financial support for the National Board's work comes from grants by the nation's major private foundations and corporations and from federal funds. Once the entire certification system is in place and operating, fees paid by or on behalf of National Board Certification candidates will support the majority of the National Board's work.

Standards

The standards for each of the more than 30 certification fields are rooted in the National Board's initial statement of policy, What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do. This statement, the vision of teaching, represents the NBPTS' view of the essential elements of exemplary practice and is organized around five core propositions:

Based on these propositions, the certificates are structured around student developmental levels and the subjects taught. The four developmental levels are:

The standards are developed by committees composed of classroom teachers, scholars and experts in child development, teacher education and the relevant subject disciplines. The standards are then reviewed nationally and extensively before final approval by the NBPTS Board of Directors.

Assessments

The NBPTS has developed an innovative, performance-based, two-part assessment system. First, during the school year, candidates assemble a portfolio of their practice, composed of student work, teacher reflections on their students' work and videotapes of their classroom activities with students. The videos and student work are supported by commentaries on the goals and purposes of instruction, reflections on what occurred, the effectiveness of the practice, and the rationale for your professional judgment. Portfolios are designed to take at least four months to complete.

Second, the candidates spend one day during the spring and the summer at an assessment center designed to provide an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge, skills and abilities in situations across the age range and topics of the certificate field. The assessment center exercises complement the portfolio and are organized around challenging teaching issues.

The National Board Certification process has been designed to reflect accurately what occurs in the classroom and in the school community. The self-analysis, required for preparing and viewing the videotapes and writing the reflective essays, benefits students directly by focusing teachers' attention on goals and objectives and by encouraging changes that hold promise of improving classroom practice. All activities are designed not only to examine a teacher's skill and knowledge but also to provide tools for helping them learn from their strengths and weaknesses.

The entire process of National Board Certification, from receiving the portfolio until all of the work is judged, takes the better part of a school year. Many teachers report spending between 200 - 400 hours on the process.

Eligibility

To be eligible for National Board Certification, teachers must have

  • completed a baccalaureate degree,
  • a minimum of three years' teaching experience at the early childhood, elementary, middle or secondary levels, and
  • a valid state teaching license for each of those years, or, where a license in not required, teachers must be teaching in schools recognized and approved to operate by the state.

As generalists, teachers develop skills and knowledge across all areas of the curriculum. To do so, they draw on a broad and deep knowledge of pedagogy. Teachers may teach all subjects in a self-contained classroom, one or more subjects on an interdisciplinary team or a single subject infused with ideas from other subjects.