Accelerating the Social Transformation of American Education: The National Board's Role and Strategy in Elevating the Teaching Profession

Abstract

High-quality teachers are critical to transforming the performance of the U.S. K-12 education system. Historically, however, the United States has not taken a systematic and coherent approach to recruiting, training, supporting, and retaining teachers. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is one of the country’s premier efforts to realize such a transformation in the teaching profession. While substantial, the progress the National Board has made to date has fallen short of the ambitious expectations that surrounded its birth. The National Board in 2012, led by its new President Ron Thorpe, finds itself--and the education sector--at a crossroads. In this capstone, I share my experience leading the development of the National Board’s five-year strategy with the hope that it proves useful to other practitioners, particularly those concerned with the professionalization of teaching in America. The strategy development work drew on diverse sources of knowledge including: the National Board’s founding and evolution; other countries’ approaches to building the teaching profession; the development of other professions in America, especially medicine; the role of teachers unions and teacher voice in teacher professionalization; the demographics and perspectives of the teacher workforce as it relates to professionalization; and the theory of adaptive leadership and how it applies to the professionalization of teaching. The resulting strategic direction describes the National Board’s new focus on anchoring the teacher career continuum with the National Board’s standards and assessments and on mobilizing National Board Certified Teachers as accomplished practitioners. An analysis of this strategic project reveals three key findings: (1) the context of an ambitious vision and an openness to external critique enabled strategy development; (2) the need for adaptive change at the National Board required the use of adaptive leadership skills; and (3) to make progress in today’s American K-12 education sector, advocates of professionalization must explicitly build political will and adapt to the cultural context. These findings yield implications that will inform my future leadership in education, the National Board and its efforts to undertake the strategy it has developed, and the advance towards professionalization in the education sector as a whole.