Teachers group leaks test, undermines Bush initiative

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The head of a national teacher-college association circulated a copy of a confidential teacher-certification exam, undermining a Bush administration initiative to certify professionals without education degrees as teachers.

Education leaders said David G. Imig, president of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, distributed the exam at a March 17 meeting hosted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Palo Alto, Calif.

The exam was being confidentially field-tested for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, also known simply as the American Board.

Mr. Imig declined to tell The Times how he obtained the exam.

Suzanne M. Wilson, a Carnegie senior scholar and education professor at Michigan State University who attended the meeting, said Mr. Imig circulated the exam to rally criticism.

"It wasn't good. ... The test for [the American Board] had running through its bones the ideology of traditionalists ... the framework of direct instruction," she said.

The breach forced the American Board to scuttle its initial field test being developed under a $5-million U.S. Education Department grant, said Kathleen Madigan, the American Board's president.

"Should anyone take that test after items had been publicized, they could have a lawsuit. Someone could practice and have unfair advantage," said Lisa Graham Keegan, president of Education Leaders Council, which formed the American Board with the National Council for Teacher Quality.

"How could we represent ourselves as a certification process that was secure for the states when people could have obtained the test and practiced?"