Laura Chapman writes:
Unfortunately, this next generation of teachers is not just subject to manipulation by Teach for America.
The new EdTPA (Teacher Performance Assessment) is one of the new gatekeepers for entry into teaching. EdTPA was designed by scholars at Stanford. It has been rubber-stamped by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). AACTE represents 800 teacher education programs..
EdTPA is aligned with the CCSS. It honors direct instruction made evident in video snippets of teaching and plans that prospective teachers submit for scoring. Scoring has been outsourced to Pearson who charges a minimum of $300 per test, while paying $70 per hour to raters of the tests. In early 2014, edTPA was being used in 511 educator preparation programs in 34 states and the District of Columbia. CCSS plus training for direct instruction over authentic education will not just fade away. http://edtpa.aacte.org/about-edtpa
States can use edTAP scores for teacher licensure. Teacher education programs can use the scores for state and national accreditations.
The edTPA scores of graduates, and gains in students’ scores that they produce on the job will now be used to rate the “effectiveness” of teacher education programs. In other words, Obama+Duncan’s flawed K-12 policies are being foisted on teacher education. The Gates’ desire to track student test scores produced by graduates of teacher education programs in on track for becoming the new normal. Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/barack-obama-arne-duncan-teacher-training-education-106013.html#ixzz2zwfJdsRs
it is hard to be optimistic. In addition to EdTPA, other tests for teacher certification require knowledge of the CCSS (e.g. Praxis http://www.ets.org/praxis/ccss). Other certifications of teacher education programs are no less troubling.
For example, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), approved new standards for teacher education in August, 2013. CAEP is a new entity merging NCATE, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and TEAC the Teacher Education Accreditation Council. In 2013, the merged organizations had accredited over 860 programs. CAEP standards must still be approved by USDE and appear to have been written for that purpose.
The standards from CAEP illustrate how hard it is to bury bad policies, and overcome horrific language about education.
Programs that prepare teachers are now called “providers.” Teachers who graduate are now called “completers.” The CAEP standards rely on 110 uses of the term “impact” to describe what teacher education and teachers are supposed to do. (Ask Diane what “impact” meant for her knee, or consider how ‘impacted” sardines may feel in a can).
Here is CAEP’s Standard 1.4 for teacher education: “Providers ensure that completers demonstrate skills and commitment that afford all P-12 students access to rigorous college-and career-ready standards (e.g., Next Generation Science Standards, National Career Readiness Certificate, Common Core State Standards).” http://caepnet.org/accreditation/standards/standard1/
CAEP Standard 4.1: “The provider documents, using multiple measures, that program completers contribute to an expected level of student-learning growth. Multiple measures shall include all available growth measures (including value-added measures, student-growth percentiles, and student learning and development objectives) required by the state for its teachers and available to educator preparation providers, other state-supported P-12 impact measures, and any other measures employed by the provider.” http://caepnet.org/accreditation/standards/standard4/ This standard is absurd. It requires the use of “measures” that are known to be invalid and unreliable.
CAEP Standard 5.4: “Measures of completer impact, including available outcome data on P-12 student growth, are summarized, externally benchmarked, analyzed, shared widely, and acted upon in decision-making related to programs, resource allocation, and future direction.” http://caepnet.org/accreditation/standards/standard5/
Clearly, the demolition derby on K-12 is expanding to damage the independent voice of faculty in higher education, especially those most directly responsible for teacher education.
The “provider” language signals that alternative paths to teachers preparation are being honored. The 42 member “commission” charged with developing CAEP’s standards was dominated by high-level administrators in education and entrepreneurs who appear to be totally unaware of (or indifferent to) the meaning of due-diligence in developing standards. They ignored sound scholarship that should have informed their work, including extensive peer-reviewed criticisms of the CCSS, value-added and related “growth” measures, as well as all the well-document flaws in industrial strength management strategies from mid-century last.
Damn the torpedos, ignore the evidence, full steam ahead.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Went through Ed TPA with my education students this spring. Not a true measure of teaching ability and wastes precious student teaching time to complete. Another hoop for ed students to jump through for licensure.
And of course, legislators around the nation will add back-door last minute language that TFA be excluded from any and all of these requirements, just like they are excluded from having to be certified, have Ed degrees, and clinical teaching internships. Those 5 weeks of training in summer school to a handful of students for a few hours a week is sufficient to grant TFAers full umbrella coverage under any state requirement to be hired. Though direct route teachers will still be made to have the proper credentials and certifications and training, and jump through hoops/roadblocks and not only compete against the TFAers for available jobs, but be excluded due to the hiring policies to choose TFA whenever possible where there is a contract with TFA. Veteran teachers will continue to be fired to make way for TFA. Those assholes drinking the koolaid (e.g, taking the bribe$) will spit out the rhetoric and praise the TFA and Kopp and Rhee. Makes me feel pukey. When does it end? How do we make it stop?
The problem is not only that evidence is being ignored. The problem is that assessment structures such as these are part of a movement that seeks to change what it means to be a teacher, what it means to be a student, and what an educational interaction is.
Great teaching is transformative. It changes habits and dispositions. The great teachers that you remember did not necessarily improve your test scores the most – they changed your mind. They made you into a person who loved to read history, or novels, or solve puzzles, or seek out patterns, or dissect animals, or play basketball. They introduced you to the gods of ancient Greece, the transcendence of Euclid, the beauty of Rembrandt, the majesty of Beethoven, and the intricacies of the infield fly rule. They knew you, and they cared for you, and they communicated their personal passions to you. Those passions are now yours, whatever your scores on the SAT.
Some of these brilliant teachers also increased your scores significantly on the end of year assessments. Others did less well at this particular task. Still others failed miserably at it.
When we choose to assess teachers by measures of short-term student achievement, we reduce teaching to instruction. No matter what you think of the standards being promoted, this form of assessment is as bad for teachers as it is for students. In the end, it will leave us with a cadre of teachers who are extremely good at teaching to the test. Some of those teachers will also be capable of inculcating passion and transmitting the adventure of learning to their students – but that will be considered incidental. Ms. A, who knows the end of year math test backwards and forwards and teaches her students the perfect strategies for taking it, will have her pay raised and eventually be promoted into school leadership. Ms. B, whose students leave her math classroom with a profound and enduring love of mathematics, but whose end of year test scores do not improve as much as expected, will be marginalized. But we all know which one of these teachers we want our children to have for math next year.
I find your explanation of transformative teaching transformative! 🙂 For some reason up until now, the discussion of transformative teaching has gone over my head. I lumped it in with the insane call for putting an excellent teacher in every classroom. Transformative teaching “…changes habits and dispositions” and “…made you into a person who loved to read history, or novels, or solve puzzles, or seek out patterns, or dissect animals, or play basketball. My grades went up and my performance improved, but that was not what mattered. What mattered was that those teachers caught me for life. They made real what to often is a cliche: they made life long learners.
Is this all an effort of making “the new normal” too big too fail?
Ohio Algebra II teacher II: yes, if you keep in mind that the self-styled “education reformers” work off a business plan whilst we work off an education model.
At the heart of their business model is privatization aka “unfettered greed will answer every need.” At the heart of our education model is the realization that if teaching and learning are as important to the very existence of the USA as the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” declaim then whatever it takes to ensure a “better education for all”—and no excuses will suffice, none whatsoever.
They rely on the general public assigning conventional meanings to the words and phrases they employ. We need to translate their Bizglish to plain direct English to make their intent plain. From near the end of George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946):
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible” that can be justified “only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.”
Which is exactly why we need to point out the misuse and debasing of the English language in the ed debates. They can’t stand the light of day.
And they can’t stand open clear discussion about their words and behaviors. This explains why the supernovas of the edufirmament like Michelle Rhee and David Coleman run in hysterical panic from appearing on a public platform with Diane Ravitch.
They themselves don’t believe in the power of their ideas.
Thank you for your observation.
😎
“one if by land, two if by sea, three if by classroom”
So many people condemn the U.S. schools in this country blaming teachers. The irony is it isn’t big gubbermint or socialists threatening the freedoms that education nurtures, it is another British invasion.
Anyone have odds Arne will be working at Pearson in the near future?
Vegas has it set at 2:1.
thank you Duane; I had suspected….. does anyone have odds on Mitchell Chester? I wish he would go TODAY…. Do you know how the Pearson/PARCC contract worked its way through New Mexico? I looked at the contract but I didn’t see Chester’s name. I keep writing to Governor Patrick about “conflict of interest”…. Thanks, Duane , I have followed a lot of your comments … and I appreciate all you do .
British INVASION…good one!
Can’t be soon enough. He has done more than enough damage.
If only we would put the time and money we are now spending on qualities that cannot be measured into quality staff development programs.I thought we had long passed the point of searching for internal states of being (e.g. I.Q. ) that somehow can be correlated with a measurable characteristic that correlates with success in life — the last twenty years of cognitive psychology have vanished in favor of a managerial mindset determined to find the holy grail of teaching and learning.
one of the comments this past week indicated that we were not active enough that we are too indifferent…. I am retired , I don’t have any “chips” to cash in any more, but for younger people get into these professional associations, read up on the process an try to get involved. I know I am behind the times but wherever you can join the professional groups (not just the unions), attend the conferences ( I know that teachers cannot always get the time off to attend) , sign up with membershps that deliver the literature, reports and primary sources (not just what you are told). One of my professors was Jerry Sroufe , cited here, and I have no contact with him now but I always respected his work and would like to get myself updated so I seek out these sources.
quote: “State Directions: SLI to Weigh Program-Effectiveness Measures; AACTE Awards 13 Chapter Support Grants…….to Weigh State Measures of Program Effectiveness. State Leaders focus on the policy issue of measuring preparation program effectiveness at the state level. As policy makers and education reform organizations continue to look closely at preparation programs, and how best to identify the factors that contribute to the development of effective educators, AACTE’s state chapters have taken up this issue as a priority for unified advocacy. In 2012 a panel moderated by Jerry Sroufe of the American Educational Research Association and including Michael Feuer (George Washington University, DC), Ron Marx (University of Arizona), and Robert Lissitz (University of Maryland) discussed what the research says about issues associated with tracking graduates to assess program effectiveness.”
I know we were all tuned in to getting health care passed the first term of Obama and personally, I left off keeping informed of the education front and what Arne Duncan was doing… then , fortunately, I came across Diane’s work… and I have nothing but gratitude for Diane an the people who are doing this work ….
just as anecdotal information, my colleagues who are still in teacher training indicate to me that large numbers of students are leaving the teacher training; one just transferred to human services/human resources, while others are switching from the teacher training programs for various reasons….. I know personally, I would hate to be entering the profession at this stage, but I am still not going to say that the professional career was a “dud” during my lifetime. One of the reasons cited for leaving is “not being able to pass the entry tests”: I have absolutely no count but I tend to think the number is “large” from what I am hearing. I have also cited multi-lingual teachers who “miss” the state exam by three points and have to pay to take it over again. Others complete a program but do not obtain certification. Only personal opinions expressed in this comment. Please understand this is all anecdotal. I know personally, I would hate to be entering the profession at this stage, but I am still not going to say that the professional career was a “dud” during my lifetime nor would I encourage all high school students to take “business” courses or “STEM” degrees.
I wrote about the perverse incentives in CAEP’s Standard 4 last year: http://alexandramiletta.blogspot.com/2013/09/teacher-preparation-standards-add-new.html
I think many colleagues involved in teacher education are so distracted by the new “rigorous” licensure requirements that they are unaware of what meeting these standards will mean. It’s not just edTPA, but the new exams that seem intentionally designed to create high failure rates. The impact on teacher candidates is undeniably negative. See http://jessicahochman.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/assessment_anxiety/ who sums up the awfulness in compelling prose.
Most of this post ends up being around issues with CCSS and not edTPA, but I wanted to clarify a flaw. Laura Chapman writes, “EdTPA is aligned with the CCSS. It honors direct instruction made evident in video snippets of teaching and plans that prospective teachers submit for scoring. Scoring has been outsourced to Pearson who charges a minimum of $300 per test, while paying $70 per hour to raters of the tests.”
edTPA does not honor direct instruction at all…the rubrics do not favor one type of instruction over another, but in all honesty they probably favor more constructivist theories as opposed to direct instruction. The rubrics in general move from being teacher centered (aka direct instruction) to student centered.
Second, the scoring is done by educators (people in higher education, former teachers, current teachers, etc).
if you look at what the colleges are trying to promote (in deference to the national policy) the alignment is with InTasc standards, CAEP standards (an amalgamation of NCATE and national board etc) and this makes the picture even fuzzier… the marketing promotion has to say it is “aligned with common core” but that is like saying aspirin works? or some other “good housekeeping seal of approval”? I am not totally up to date on this but I ‘ve been trying to read the “promotional ” literature coming out from the colleges. It seems to me the alignment started with CAPE/edTPA and is “backing into” core? At any rate the “coherence” of using one ideology over all others doesn’t seem to work but it is what they have pushed with CC when they use the hirsch currculum and theories. I am open to listening on this discussion and being corrected where I am mistaken.
Like saying aspirin works is interesting. Alignment to common core in the edTPA rubrics boils down to the expectation for instruction that pursues a substantive learning objective that leads to engaging students in understanding significant content, defined within the subject area. For example, in mathematics, instruction that leads to conceptual understanding, not just computational skills. What is objectionable in that?
When you have pain, aspirin works. When you want to know that children will learn, look at the prospective teacher’s ability to design engaging active learning situations. That seems pretty constructivist to me.
An why is an anonymous reviewer more capable of doing that than the professional staff associated with the prospective teacher’s program? This whole process is based on the fallacy of a largely incompetent teaching profession. The stage fright of the new teacher is being confused with poor training, where adequate, on the job, mentoring programs would do more to continue the professional growth of new teacher than another hoop before certification.
Another reasonable narrative is that independent (well qualified) third party evaluation of beginning teacher competence is an asset to our argument that comprehensive teacher prep programs are serving the public well. The edTPA model does so nationally like none other that we have had. I fully understand the concern about Pearson, but I also acknowledge that the water bottle I sip from is branded either Nestle or Dasani. We live in a corporatized world. The edTPA is not flawed by its association with Pearson, it is simply brought to national scale.
I agree, 2old2teach–inexperience is not incompetency. People in any profession need time to learn and develop expertise. No one says that med. schools and law schools are on the whole useless because their graduates need time and development to become really skilled but that is thrown at teacher preparation every day. Also I just want to make the point that teacher preparation is more nuanced and deep than “teacher training”. I hope those who understand the complexities of teaching and learning will use the term “preparation”.
‘Also I just want to make the point that teacher preparation is more nuanced and deep than “teacher training”. ‘
Preparation is a much better word although a lot of today’s PD is closer to training (and, by the way, insulting).
I work in arts education. I have looked at the protocol for edTPA visual arts , the guidance for prospective teachers on preparing three to five video clips for the exam, and other documentation.
The guidance and scoring protocol in the current version of edTPA is derived from long lists of rubrics from Charlotte Danielson and Robert Marzano, also derivatives of these in the Gates-funded MET studies, and INSTAC professional standards…and before that Mager’s behavioral/instructional objectives of the 1970s, and before that training guides for WW II…. and so on.
These protocols conflate education and training, meaning they favor direct instruction with immediate evidence of “I get it,” from students. ‘Getting it” means a response that can be affirmed as correct/ incorrect/or more or less appropriate. It does not mean generating ideas, exploring possibilities for elaboration of these, and much else that is central to learning in the arts (and not unique to the arts). Videos with the production values honored by edPTA will show the teacher actively delivering instruction, sage on the stage. The test-taker whose video has the highest production values will have an advantage, even if everything else is mediocre. This is true for every subject.
The practices and “evidence” that edPTA requires are designed for low-inference scoring at modest pay by scorers vetted for having a college degree and some connection to education. There is no guarantee that edPTA materials submitted by students will be scored by an experienced teacher at the same grade level and subject. In any case, I found no rationale for summing (or weighting) the individual rubrics.
I found nothing tethered to a “constructivist” view (or theory) of teaching and learning– or any explicit philosophy or theory. The whole impulse for this effort comes from a poorly rationalize decision that novice teachers “must be tested like other professions”…as if this test is somehow a gold standard that will guarantee that a new generation of teachers will be treated as professionals. WIshful thinking. No mention of the Gates’ and feds interest in doing a triage on teacher education programs based on these tests, and a triage on these novice teachers after they are employed in schools if they fail meet their expected learning targets.
At present, the edPTA for the visual arts is one size fits all, K-12. That is decidedly unconstuctivist. It is also inexplicable because some other subjects have separate protocols (lists of rubrics) for elementary, middle, and high school. In any case, the current rubrics are already out of date because there are new standards in the arts (and in the sciences).
The scoring rubrics in the visual arts reflect an expectation that a novice teacher will display (in video snippets) attention to an approved “academic vocabulary” said to be essential for “best practice teaching.” Key terms are recycled from the Bloom Taxonomy: Cognitive Domain–mid-century last, with no hint that there once were similar taxonomies for the “affective” and “psychomotor” domains. The emphasis on proper use and display of an “academic vocabulary” while teaching is totally out of proportion to a focus on whether the content worthy of study, and much else.
Art teacher lessons and videos are supposed to present evidence of attending to six major categories of concepts–subject, style, so-called “elements and principles,” genre (defined in a screwy way borrowed from the CCSS), and more. The description of an exemplary third grade art lesson–exemplary for edPTA–is designed as drill in an out-dated vocabulary and with a little dab of hands on work. It is thin, conventional, and compliant with a checklist.
Finally, I left several questions about reliability and validity for the visual arts exam at the edPTA website. I did so because the sample size intended to support claims about reliability are small and I could find no published information about subject and grade level validity studies. I also asked why one exam was required for K-12 in the arts while some other subjects were differentiated by major grade spans. Certifications in the arts are not always K-12. My questions have not been answered.
In effect, there are different and often unexplained values operating in how these tests are constructed. I found nothing here that resonated with my understanding of constructivist thinking, especially in the arts, where contributions from Maxine Greene, Elliot Eisner and others remain influential and relevant to school-based arts education.
EdTPA does promote teacher- directed instruction in the sense that vocabulary must be introduced and taught before teachers engage students with learning experiences that promote conceptual understanding. I would call this deductive rather than inductive and is more traditional that constructivist. I am especially curious to see how it works in science , which is supposed to use and foster inquiry approaches. EdTPA is a mish-mash process that doesn’t promote professional decision-making but does allow teacher preparation programs to avoid an accreditation system that is entirely superficial, ill-considered, and punitive. In other words it is the lesser of two evils — choosing EdTPA over NCTQ allows teacher prep. programs to have some control over preparing candidates to be successful in the field but it is not a sound approach. It will fail in the end because the expectations are too advanced for those who haven’t had much teaching experience, it assumes that “learning” of anything significant can occur in 2-4 hours, and it will exclude those from entering the teaching profession who do not have the economic resources of the middle class or whose talents are in relationship-building. I predict in 5 years it will be gone because there will be large scale–“failure” by candidates who need years to develop expertise that EdTPA purports to measure and in the meantime there will be few teachers able to enter the slots left by the many retiring from the profession. This post doesn’t even begin to address the many ways that young people are being discouraged from entering the profession and the long term consequences of such.
Laura, that is all so well said. To me there is a telling slide used by SCALE in their edTPA trainings with a continuum scale from “not ready” to “accomplished beginner” with “teacher focus” and “whole class” on the low end and “student focus” and “individuals/flex groups” on the high end. It speaks volumes about how impossible it is to put all of teaching on a rubric, scale, or measurement instrument. It simply can’t be done. No one can deny that there are certainly many times when a teacher needs to focus on the whole class and others when attention shifts to individuals or groups. Why is one indicative of “not ready” and the other of an “accomplished beginner”? It’s just absurd.
The effect on new teachers is not the only negative aspect of edTPA. See the videos below from the March edTPA Conference at Barnard College to learn about one pre-service teacher’s take on its effects on her students. They effectively become guinea pigs and can be isolated and separated from learning due to some of the parameters of the test. Barbara Madeloni was the key speaker at this event.
Just a minor point, Pearson pays $70 per Portfolio, not $70 per hour and scoring portfolios takes more than an hour. the pay is closer to $50 an hour and if a scorer receives a portfolio it has to be scored within 2 days.
Thanks for the correction.
I recently reviewed the sample questions for the Pearson educator certification exams here in Florida.
They are practically a love poem for standardization and standardized tests.