The education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives plans to investigate accusations that the head of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education sabotaged the development of a certification test for people who want to pursue alternative routes to becoming schoolteachers, the committee's chairman said on Thursday.

Rep. John A. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, also called for the Department of Education's inspector general to look into questions about whether David G. Imig, president of the teacher-education association, had improperly obtained questions being developed for the new certification test by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. Using a $5-million grant from the Education Department, the board has been working on a method to grant national teacher-certification to college graduates who have not majored in education.

"It's no secret that the education establishment wants to hang onto the monopoly it holds on teacher certification," Mr. Boehner said Thursday in a statement. "But if there was a deliberate act of sabotage against a program supported by the tax dollars of American parents and workers, then a big line has been crossed."

Mr. Boehner said he would ask the Education Department to review a federal grant awarded to the association to create a clearinghouse of information on teacher-education programs. The congressman wants the department to determine whether the association's clearinghouse provided unbiased information about the certification board.

Mr. Imig denied the accusations on Thursday, saying such "character attacks" were "patently absurd." He acknowledged that he had obtained a copy of a field test that had been used by the board in developing its final test. He had used the field-test questions in March in a debate with the certification board's president, Kathleen Madigan, at a community-college conference.

"I used that prior field test to make a series of specific criticisms about the approach, content, and potential impact of such a test in my remarks to that audience," he said in a statement. "Ms. Madigan was fully aware that I had the field test during our debate and was also aware that this pilot test was not to be used again by the test provider."

But Ms. Madigan said on Thursday that the certification board had planned to use some of the field-test questions in the final version of its test. She questioned how Mr. Imig had obtained the questions in the first place, since they had been posted only on a secure Web site by the developer with which the board had been working, ACT Inc.

Other traditional teacher-education groups, in addition to the association, have criticized the certification board's approach as simplistic and inadequate. But Ms. Madigan and her group's supporters say that the board's method provides a simplified means for helping smart people with expertise in academic subjects become schoolteachers. "AACTE and other organizations apparently regard the board as a threat to their continued collective livelihoods," board officials said in a statement.

Meanwhile, ACT officials acknowledged on Thursday that selected questions on a field test for the certification board were compromised when someone copied them without authorization. But the company added that the compromised questions constituted only 10 percent of the items that ACT had developed for the certification board, and the company quickly offered to replace those questions.

The certification board later dissolved its relationship with ACT, in part over questions about the new certification program's Board of Directors. Ms. Madigan says that ACT wanted to be represented on her group's Board of Directors, and her group was "uncomfortable" with that requirement. The certification board is now working with a company called Promissor to develop the certification test, she said, and is only about six weeks behind in its process because of the earlier test questions that were compromised.