Legislature should fully fund salary bump for Ky teachers who get nationally certified

Yesterday, after another exhausting day of virtual teaching during the third school year of a pandemic, my six-year-old son, who had spent the day in his own, separate virtual classroom in the adjoining room, decided to be helpful by critiquing my teaching.

“Mama, you seem too focused when you teach. It seemed like you were putting too much pressure on your students. Did you think about what the kids were feeling during your lesson?”

Let me pause here to note how passionate I am about student voice and the empowerment of young people. I am so glad that my son thinks for himself, critiques authority, and feels comfortable enough with me, his own mother, to share his assessment of my teaching choices.

Still, I snapped, “Of course I did,” and felt something pent-up and dark rise within me. Why was I suddenly feeling so defensive and cagey? My son was just speaking up for my students after all---?

I realized again at that moment how easy our work appears, how teachers’ authority doesn’t always feel respected, and how our choices and intentions are often invisible or unclear to outside observers. Everyone who has been a student (including my son in his first year of school) feels they have the expertise to critique a teacher, even if they can only hear fragments of a lesson on one side of a Google Meet. It’s normal. It’s every day. Teachers themselves, and not just their work, are in the public domain.

Effective teaching is not easy, however, nor is it simple. It is impressively complex, actually. So complex that the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has created over 1,300 pages of documents describing what accomplished teaching looks like, sounds like, feels like, and ought to aspire to be in nearly every content area, including such subjects as art, career-and-technical education (CTE), primary literacy, secondary sciences, middle grades mathematics, and more.

Demonstrating competence with these high standards is an intensely challenging feat in which teachers spend one to five years developing a portfolio and taking a rigorous assessment to prove their knowledge of content, teaching, and, most importantly, their students. Teachers demonstrate how they use their knowledge, training, past experience, and understanding of who their students are as whole human individuals to make specific, intentional decisions about the goals they set for those students and how they support their growth and progress toward achieving those goals.

When I became a National Board-certified teacher, or NBCT, in 2013, the hundreds of hours I put into the work was not just about proving myself to be an accomplished teacher in order to earn the respect of folks outside education, nor was it only about the salary benefits that come with certifying as an NBCT in Kentucky — although I would be lying if I said those weren’t both factors in my decision to pursue certification.

Fully funding the current legislation for the salary supplement for Kentucky NBCTs would mean more teachers pursue National Board certification, maintain their certification, and more districts support their most promising teachers to pursue Board certification. More NBCTs directly translates to more learning for students, which some studies have quantified as a one- to two-month gain for the students of National Board-certified teachers. The salary supplement is a high-value, highly effective, low-cost way to improve education outcomes in our commonwealth.

Most teachers work extremely hard. While the work we do is difficult, NBCTs know it’s worth it, and we are more likely to remain in the classroom. Recent data collected by the Kentucky Department of Education put the rate of teacher turnover at 16.2 percent last year, while the turnover rate for NBCTs was only 0.7 percent. NBCTs are staying in the classroom and effectively teaching.

Fully funding the salary supplement would encourage more teachers to become Board-certified and entice those who have proven they can meet rigorous standards to stay. It’s one way we can combat teacher shortages and ensure we protect our most precious resource: our children.

Sarah Yost, NBCT serves as a staff developer at Byck Elementary in Jefferson County and is the current President of Kentucky National Board Network.

This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 8:32 AM.