History

The Beginnings of a Movement

The first major call for the establishment of a national teacher standards and evaluation board came in 1985, when Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, suggested how such an organization might work:

It would be a group that would spend a period of time studying exactly what a teacher should know before becoming certified and the best way to measure that knowledge...Over a period of time, I would hope the board would eventually be controlled by the profession itself, even if it didn’t start completely that way.

This vision moved a step closer to reality when the Carnegie Corporation of New York funded the establishment of NBPTS following the recommendations of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy’s Task Force on Teaching as a Profession.

The task force’s final report — A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century — released on May 15, 1986, called for the creation of a board to “define what teachers should know and be able to do” and “support the creation of rigorous, valid assessments to see that certified teachers do meet those standards.”

A planning group, later to evolve into the NBPTS Board of Directors, made crucial decisions about the direction and structure of the new organization. Chaired by former North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., the group stipulated that the majority of its board members would be teachers currently active in the classroom.

“This was more than a symbolic gesture,” Gov. Hunt said. “This effort, to have any chance of success, needed to have credibility and the confidence of the teachers.”

Still today, teacher decision-making and leadership has remained the hallmark of NBPTS. National Board Certification is developed by teachers for teachers, with teachers heavily involved in each step of the process from writing standards, designing assessments and evaluating candidates.