HB 2343 – National Board Certification Bonus

HB 2343 does a number of ugly things to the K12 system as part of the terrible, devastating budget cuts to education and everything else the state does. One of the proposed changes is to permanently eliminate the inflation adjustment to the bonus we pay to teachers who have achieved National Board Certification. I do not support this change. I will attempt to amend the provision out of the bill. While we are not able to provide the cost of living adjustment in this year’s budget, we should re-start our commitment next year. The bill is permanent. My amendment makes it temporary for this budget only.

The National Board system is the one performance-based element of our compensation system. There is reasonably strong experimental evidence that students who have a National Board certified teacher learn 7-14% more material in a given year than students who have a similarly situated teacher who is not certified. I worked for 5 years to get this element into the law and will work equally hard to keep in play. We cannot expect teachers to make the investment in the training and the extensive application process if we are going to frequently change the availability of the funds for the bonus.

For more information on the bill click here.

Author: Ross

I am the Director of the Department of Early Learning for Washington State. I formerly represented the 48th Legislative District in the State House of Representatives, chairing the Appropriations committee and spent many a year at Microsoft.