Dive Brief:

• The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards decided to end its principal certification program following a Saturday vote.

• The principal certification program—a nearly 5-year effort that has cost the organization $3.5 million—was voted down unanimously due to financial and administrative challenges.

• Additionally, according to National Board President Ronald Thorpe, too few principals stuck around for the entirety of the pilot program, making the sample base too small to guarantee validity and reliability when scoring participants. 

Dive Insight:

While the National Board’s teaching certification program—which has been around for 25 years—has been criticized for being too broad and not really effective, the decision to drop the principal program shows a discrepancy for expectations of teachers and administrators.

While teachers are expected—and often required—to jump through hoops for evaluation programs like the teaching certification program, the principals were not held to the same expectation. According to one principal involved in the pilot program, only 120 of the 1,600 original principals remained in the program.