A few years ago, the Powers-That-Be decided that the biggest problem in American education was the teachers. McKinsey said that other nations attracted the top performing graduates of the most prestigious universities into teaching, while our own sorry teachers came from the bottom of the barrel. In the hunt for perpetrators of what was wrongly assumed to be a national education disaster (after all, test scores and graduation rates were at an all-time high), the nation’s teacher-preparation institutions were a natural scapegoat. They were also an easy target, since people have complained about them for generations, and they have no high-profile defenders. Even Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, joined the ranks of the critics.
The answer: more tests for would-be teachers. Of course. And who would own the tests? Pearson. Of course.
Any policy talk about the proliferation of online masters’s degrees sold by for-profit diploma mills? No.
In part 1 of this two-part series, teacher educator Alexandra Miletta reviews the origins and workings of Pearson’s edTPA.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just reviewed the sample questions for the Pearson-designed-and-administered teacher tests in Florida. Many of the questions, even on the subject-specific tests, deal not with content-area knowledge but with education, teaching, and learning generally.
And guess what? Many of the questions have variants of the same answers:
Bullet lists of standards, good
Standardized testing, good
What a surprise, huh?
If you have to take one of these tests, just keep those two key principles in mind. You’ll do fine.
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Would those tests be replaced by the Pearson EdTPA or are the in addition to it? Here’s one issue Alexandra raises for the NY case:
“The registration fee for taking edTPA through Pearson is $300. Failure to pass the first time may result in retaking one task for an additional $100 fee, or having to resubmit the whole thing and pay another $300 fee. Only a few vouchers were distributed to institutions so not everyone who is receiving financial aid qualified for a voucher. Candidates who receive a voucher can only get one so they still have to pay the fees for other exams.
In addition, initial certification candidates must take 3 exams and only one, the CST, is being grandfathered in New York. The total cost for those exams is $352. The exams that most candidates have previously taken, the LAST and ATS-W, cost $238. That brings the minimum expense to $990, assuming the candidates pass all exams the first time.”
And, if you argue that the current (Pearson brand) tests are lousy, does that mean you’re arguing for the new, improved (Pearson brand) edTPA?
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I am all for subject-area tests. Tests of content knowledge. I think that American history teachers should know history, that literature teachers should know literature, that German teachers should know German, and so on. But these tests, in their other forms, new and old, no. Definitely not in favor. There are many, many ways in which to be a good teacher. Any system that requires a single teaching style misunderstands, at a fundamental level, the human and transactional nature of teaching, in all its wondrous variety.
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But what do you think, chemtchr? I am certainly NOT arguing for the new edTPA or for any of these top-down measures. Big mistake, even if well intentioned. Those who wish to standardize teaching do not understand it, at all.
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Here’s what I think of these education gurus and their across-the-board, invariant mandates, however enlightened:
The Buddha said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
His point? Beware of gurus. There are many paths.
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Even my desire that teachers be knowledgeable in their subjects has to be qualified. One of the best elementary school teachers I ever knew was far, far from being a scholar. But her kids would have, and did, follow her anywhere, and she took them to amazing places. So, I would want those tests to be very minimal, if they were given at all. The Pearson test sample questions ask, for example, which of these authors grew up in Eatonville, Florida? Well, I can imagine a teacher who is, say, extraordinarily well versed in a lot of literature–perhaps this person has a passion for and a broad knowledge of post-Colonial literature at all levels of sophistication–but just happens never to have read or to have read about Zora Neale Hurston. There are many ways in which to be knowledgeable.
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Bob, I wish you’d take time to study Alexandra Miletta’s important work (presented here, in this important venue for discussion), and then carefully help unpack her new and interesting points for discussion.
There may not be another chance to do this, and I’m worried the actual content is about to get swamped.
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will do, chemtchr, and thanks for the warning
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I very much see what you mean, chemtchr. Andrea Miletta has done really great work here. A must read.
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Yikes, cx: Alexandria, not Andrea
Again, really important work, as chemtchr says. Everyone should read this piece by Ms. Miletta.
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This isn’t to the point of the post, but I wanted to share it:
Evaluation Session
OK, you are sitting in your year-end evaluation session, and you’ve heard from every other teacher in your school that his or her scores were a full level lower this year than last, and so you know that the central office has leaned on the principal to give fewer Exemplary and Satisfactory ratings even though your school actually doesn’t have a problem with its test scores and people are doing pretty much what they did last year but a bit better, of course, because one grows each year as a teacher–one refines what one did before, and one never stops learning.
But you know that this ritual doesn’t have anything, really, to do with improvement. It has to do with everyone, all along the line, covering his or her tushy and playing the game and doing exactly what he or she is told. And, at any rate, everyone knows that the standardized tests are invalid and that’s not really the issue at your school because, the test scores are pretty good anyway because this is a suburban school with affluent parents, and the kids always, year after year, do quite well.
So whether the kids are learning isn’t really the issue. The issue is that by some sort of magic formula, each cohort of kids is supposed to perform better than the last–significantly better–on the tests, though they come into your classes in exactly the same shape they’ve always come into them in because, you know, they are kids and they are just learning and teaching ISN’T magic. It’s a lot of hard work. It’s magical, sometimes, really magical, but it’s not magic. There’s no magic formula.
So, the stuff you’ve been told to do in your “trainings” (“Bark. Roll over. Sit. Good Boy”) is pretty transparently teaching-to-the-test because that’s the only way the insane demand that each cohort be magically superior to the last as measured by the junk tests can be met, but you feel in your heart of hearts that doing that would be JUST WRONG–it would short-change your students to start teaching InstaWriting-for-the Test, Grade 5, for example, instead of, say, teaching writing. And despite all the demeaning crap you are subjected to, you still give a damn.
And you sit there and you actually feel sorry for this principal because she, too, is squirming, deformed, like a fly in treacle in the muck that is Education Deform, and she knows she has fantastic teachers who knock it out of the park year after year, but her life has become a living hell of accountability reports and data chats to the point that she doesn’t have time for anything else anymore (she has said this many times), and now she has to sit there and tell her amazing veteran teachers who have worked so hard all these years and who care so much and give so much and are so learned and caring that they are just satisfactory, or worse, and she feels like hell doing this and is wondering when she can retire.
And the fact that you BOTH know this hangs there in the room–the big, ugly, unspoken thing, and though you are the one getting the lower evaluation, you feel sorry for HER. And the politicians and the plutocrats and the clueless policy wonks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and that smarmy know-nothing David Coleman and the Secretary of the Department for the Privatization of Education, formerly the USDE, and the Vichy education guru collaborators with Education Deform and even the presidents of your unions barrel ahead, like so many drunks in a car plowing through a crowd of pedestrians.
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I wonder if there will come a point where Darling-Hammond gets sick of her weasel act, and actually comes out AGAINST the crap she’s perpetrating?
“…developed by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE) at Stanford University and was promoted by the leading scholar in the field, Linda Darling-Hammond. ”
So, she’s helped paint “performance assessment” decorations on Pearson’s juggernaut. Will she criticize it for betraying her own values, or herself for perpetrating another corporate fraud under color of “multiple factors”?
Let’s listen:
“Linda Darling Hammond said, “New York is a prototype of how not to implement teacher performance assessment” (this prompted a big audience reaction), “and some of us have been very engaged in speaking to the policy community there about how they ought to be rethinking some aspects of that, and I think you will see some things at the next Regents’ meeting that are hopefully a result of those conversations.”
Oh, drat! It’s just that damned faulty New York roll out again.
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What the Buddha said
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I am working on a doctoral research project inspired by Diane’s book, Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011). If the public school system–as many of us knew it, at least–is dead or near death, it would stand to reason that public school teachers who remember the system as it was prior to No Child Left Behind (2002) have experienced loss and grief. If you remember what it was like to teach prior to No Child Left Behind, if you feel as if teaching completely changed when No Child Left Behind was implemented, or if you ever felt saddened by some of the changes that resulted from educational reform, then you may be interested in taking my survey.
Professional Loss and Grief in Teachers (a survey)
https://ndstate.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5nCLnPAFadWZX93
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Important work you are doing, Jackie, documenting this. I think of the people who worked for the WPA, back in the day, collecting the narratives of people who had been formerly enslaved. There are so many stories to be told of the distortion of the profession by Ed Deform. And for the most part, no one hears these.
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Okay, I did that.
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Jackie, most of us who participate on this blog do so because we don’t believe public education is dead, and are working/fighting to keep privatizers from killing it.
We’re not mourning; we’re organizing.
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Which was my comment on the survey, Michael. There isn’t a dot to click for “No, by God, I’m fighting it!”
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God, I hope somebody is actually reading this. PLEASE, please open the links and read the actual stories.
Here’s the New York Times story from two years ago, when UMASS Amherst professor Barbara Madeloni and her students stood up to Pearson’s edTPA.
“Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest”
“They have refused to send Pearson two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching, as well as a 40-page take-home test, requirements of an assessment that will soon be necessary for licensure in several states.”
“This is something complex and we don’t like seeing it taken out of human hands,” said Barbara Madeloni, who runs the university’s high school teacher training program. “We are putting a stick in the gears.”
“Lily Waites, 25, who is getting a master’s degree to teach biology, found that the process of reducing 270 minutes of recorded classroom teaching to 20 minutes of video was demeaning and frustrating, made worse because she had never edited video before. “I don’t think it showed in any way who I am as a teacher,” she said. “It felt so stilted.”
Barbara Madeloni was later fired from UMASS Amherst Education Department for her principled opposition. She is running for president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, at this very moment. The election is May 10.
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This is an experiment.
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Okay, anyway, here’s the link to Winerip’s outstanding NY Times coverage. He also paid with his job, of course, and he also continues the fight from his new position.
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So perhaps we should start requiring doctors in training to tape themselves. I’m sure Pearson could do an honest assessment of their clinical skills based on a twenty minute tape. NOT! There is absolutely no reason to insert Pearson into the equation. They are not the answer to every manufactured cry of teacher inadequacy. Perhaps we could get Danielson’s rubric in there, too. I’m not sure why we even bought into the false narrative of an incompetency crisis in teaching. We go through some program of teacher training accredited by our state. Then we take whatever tests the state requires to become certified. After that, we already go through a 2-4 year probational teaching period. (I have no idea how it is handled in non-union states.) How many hoops do we need? It seems to me we have a massive testing industry trying to insert themselves into the process. They are not needed.
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well said
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Here’s a delightful new link Alexandra just tweeted. It describes the current state of Pearson’s portfolio “evaluations” in New York, among many other things. Remember, each student teacher is paying Pearson a $300 fee.
Is Pearson Education in Serious Financial Trouble?
” New York State is in the middle of collecting student teacher portfolios known as edTPA that will be evaluated by Pearson to determine if candidates qualify for teacher certification. But as of March 17, 2014, Pearson was still trying to hire people to evaluate the portfolios. Pearson was requesting that “scorers possess both strong pedagogical content-specific knowledge and experience in roles that support teaching and learning in the edTPA content area in which they are scoring,” but had no procedure in place to evaluate the evaluators. The portfolios contain twenty minutes of video and as much as fifty pages of lesson planning and commentary, but evaluators were expected to complete their task in two hours and were being paid $75 per portfolio or $37.50 an hour if they work fast.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/is-pearson-education-in-s_b_5212784.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
This is how Pearson came to be the most hated brand in education. That’s gotta be worth something to your bottom line, eh?
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An informative article, “Is Pearson Education in Serious Financial Trouble?”, posted by Alan Singer. The following comment, in particular, caught my eye. Thank you, chemtchr for supplying the link.
“I also have questions about whether a financially desperate Pearson may be creating demand for its products by making tests more difficult to deflate student performance.”
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