Michael J. Ludwig is a professor of specialized program in education at Hofstra University in New York. He prepares teachers. He wrote this letter to Pearson and invited me to post it, without his student’s name.
Dear edTPA,
Where do I begin?
- With the fact that I have over 30 years’ experience in health education that includes work as a teacher at the middle school, high school, and higher education levels?
- With the fact that I have three degrees (BS, MS, PhD) in health education but apparently I can’t be trusted to judge whether or not someone is prepared to lead a health education classroom?
- With the fact that the art and craft of teaching has been reduced to a series of bureaucratic measurements done by someone who has never met the aspiring teacher?
- With the fact that while I was intensely skeptical of edTPA from the start, I worked diligently to “get up to speed” and revised our curriculum and program to meet the demands of edTPA despite the fact that the vast majority of our master’s degree students are already certified and do not have to submit a portfolio?
- With the fact that the way New York State rolled out edTPA is now viewed as a textbook case of how NOT to do it?
- With the fact that a high stakes decision such as teacher licensing is decided by a Pearson employee who has never met and will never meet the candidates submitting their edTPA portfolio?
- With the fact that my 2 years of work with health education teacher candidates no longer has any bearing on whether or not they are able to get licensed to teach in New York State?
- With the fact that despite the cooperating teachers’ beliefs at my students’ field work placements that my students were progressing appropriately and were on track to become master teachers counts for nothing?
- With the fact that edTPA scorers are not required to have experience as classroom teachers?
- With the fact that edTPA scorers are paid a paltry $75 to decide whether or not a candidate is allowed to realize a dream?
With the fact that despite all my misgivings, I registered to become a health education scorer for Pearson’s edTPA so as to better be able to provide support to my health education students?
As I’m certain you will not address all the previous questions (which are posed rhetorically), I will attempt to provide some context for this note by answering this last question. I am currently employed by Pearson to become a health education edTPA scorer. I have not completed my training and have come to realize even more than I first believed, that the entire edTPA process is a fraud that I will no longer participate in. However, humor me and let me provide some background:
I scored the first health education practice portfolio and was told during the subsequent webinar that I was the best scorer they had worked with to date. I was told that I hit the majority of the rubrics with the score that was expected and the few that I didn’t get exactly were adjacent. As the demands of the semester increased, I never got around to scoring and submitting the second practice portfolio. One of the demands I was facing was to support a candidate during her student teaching.
I supported my current candidate (xxxxxxxxxx) as she designed, implemented, and evaluated three consecutive lessons on stress management for her edTPA portfolio where we both used the “Thinking Behind the Rubrics” as our guide and were confident that no rubric was below a three and that most of them should have earned a four or five.
I followed edTPA’s guidelines for appropriate candidate support but frankly I’m not sure I could have written a better series of lessons. However, my informal assessment of the portfolio was deemed VERY wrong. I say that because yesterday edTPA sent the score report back to my student (she shared it with me) and found 14 of the 15 rubrics were scored a two, with one rubric (#6) scored a three? Now, like any good researcher, I understand the role bias could play in my reading of my student’s portfolio. However, these scores were so divergent from where I believed they should be that I have to believe that the portfolio was given only a cursory read at best. Or, there had to be some issue with the scorer. The notion that there is no recourse and the that the scoring system lacks any degree of transparency is ludicrous. A person should have to defend and support their assessment. Reading the comments of the scorer of Ms. xxxxxxxx’s edTPA score report told me that whoever that person is, they either didn’t understand the writing or they didn’t bother to read carefully. Not that it’s germane to this issue but Ms. xxxxx has at least three peer-reviewed publications in journals.
The fact that this process costs $300 is a heavy burden for many aspiring educators. Further, the fact that edTPA charges an additional $100 for a rescore in unconscionable. Ms. xxxxxxx submitted her portfolio on March 22, 2016 and was one of the first to submit from Hofstra University. I feel one source of scorer error could be due to this early submission.
I insist that edTPA re-examine Ms. xxxxxxx’s submission by a fully trained and vetted veteran scorer of health education portfolios at no charge to her. I have concerns about the process: If a person has their portfolio rescored, is the scorer told that it is a “rescore”? If so, they would have to know that the rescore was the result of not passing on the initial scoring which would clearly bias the scorer. I must admit I have no faith in the edTPA system. The system crushed a promising young woman who worked tirelessly to follow the edTPA handbook. Not only that, and more importantly, Ms. xxxxxxxxx was ultimately most interested in teaching her students the functional knowledge and health-related skills so as facilitate and improve their health and wellbeing.
I could go on but others have done an excellent job questioning the usefulness of edTPA. I would imagine you are familiar with these critiques and have dismissed them. I believe they are largely accurate and spot on.
http://www.nea.org/home/63423.htm
http://catalyst-chicago.org/2015/05/a-laundry-list-of-problems-with-new-edtpa-teacher-assessment/
https://dianeravitch.net/2015/07/07/a-teacher-life-ruined-by-pearsons-edtpa/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/new-challenges-to-pearson_b_7312856.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/trouble-rubrics/
Sincerely,
Michael J. Ludwig, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Health Education
Hofstra University
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder how the $300 is shared out.
Pearson should be booted out of the US entirely — barred from doing contracts with states and with schools.
It’s absurd that a British multinational should determine who gets to teach in the US.
“Bowdlerdash”
The Pearson tests are bowdlerdash
Ephemeral nimbus plinths
They’re really an insufferable hash
Enough to make you wince
“The British are Coming”
The British are Coming
They’re PARCCing in schools
The Pearsons are drumming
We’re acting like fools
We beat them in battle
But now we surrender
They treat us like cattle
As corporate provender
“Pearson Boardroom Banter”
We beat them with a test!
With not a bullet fired!
Completed is the quest
That King George once desired
“The Pros and Cons of Testing
”
Pearson are the pros
At conning bureaucrat
And what do you $uppo$e
They u$e to pull off that?
They should also be forbidden to contract with other countries to provide cheap “education.” (ie Liberia, etc.)
Threatened,
No one can prohibit Pearson from buying control of education in poor nations
I know, Diane. I just wish that COULD happen. I weep fpr those children, who already have so many challenges, getting a scripted, out of the box education.
We can’t forbid it but we can surely influence it.
One way to influence it would be to refuse to buy Pearson products (eg, textbooks).
Pearson stands to lose orders of magnitude more from a boycott by American schools (k-12 and universities) than they stand to gain in places like Liberia.
Thank you SDP for your suggestion. I am second to your motion. May
Yes, yes, yes to:
[start quote]
Pearson should be booted out of the US entirely — barred from doing contracts with states and with schools.
It’s absurd that a British multinational should determine who gets to teach in the US.
[end quote]
Thanks for the edTPA Poetry. I was similarly inspired in April–National Poetry Month.
There once was a man at Stanford
He had been head of an Ed Board
What he adopted
King soon co-opted
We hope teacher ed is restored!
There was an assessment educative
Its advocates voted affirmative
At NAME
And AERA
Its critics truly were speculative.
edTPA scores came today
They’ve only led us astray
We’re learning to teach
We hope we can reach
But now we only know dismay!
Thank you, Michael J. Ludwig….
Another SCAM! $300? Boy, will the creative way to mil the system never end?
Pearson is cornering the market for tests of professional and academic competence. They are acting as an expensive gatekeeper making people jump through their hoops in order to gain access to a career they may already have prepared for. My son graduated last year with honors and wants to be a network administrator. This year he has taken three qualifying exams at about three hundred dollars a piece, and he has to take two more in order to make himself marketable. He has passed each test, but they are difficult. Pearson makes more money when people fail! It is outrageous that we have to spend another $1500 (that’s if he passes all on the first try) so he can prove he meets minimum standards. Also, he has wasted another year preparing for these doing some odd jobs, but I am pretty much supporting him. I guess you could call it a “gap test year.”
“. . .so he can prove he meets minimum standards. . .”
And there is no logical proof whatsoever that even with passing the test with 100% that the test actually assesses the construct(s) that it claims to.
You’re right. We pay so he can get the “Pearson stamp of approval.” There is also no guarantee that teachers or students passing Pearson tests will do better in the real world. Testing is a cash cow for Pearson; that’s the real goal.
On the nose. 😦
This is the IT rat race/tread mill you son has signed up for, endless testing. I hope someone warned him. And trust me, he is just getting started. If he wants to be in IT he’ll be testing forever. I know, I was in IT for 30 years.
I’m going to swim upstream for a moment, these IT tests are not Pearson tests. These IT tests are built by the different vendors, Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, etc. Pearson has the facilities and the technical infrastructure to deliver these tests for the vendors for a fee.The vendor sets the passing score. The vendor scores the tests. I’m assuming your son is testing at the Pearson VUE centers?
At one time, I think the IT testing was valid and a thing of value. No longer do I believe that. Once it got popular it just became another revenue stream for all these vendors. Then you have the “paper Cisco guy” That’s a guy who went to a Cisco boot-camp maybe, where they teach the tests, at a high price, and passed all the Cisco tests at a Pearson VUE center, but has zero or no real world knowledge or experience. Then you have seasoned veterans who can do the work at a high level, but who are lousy test takers and cannot pass the certification tests. It can be tricky. Some hiring managers understand this, some don’t.
I would be curios to know which vendor certification he is seeking.
He’s currently preparing for the MCSA exam. He is a good test taker, but he needs an entry level job to get more practical experience to get started. It sounds like an expensive treadmill as these certifications have a five year shelf life.
The certification treadmill is just part of IT life. In all fairness, I don’t think we can blame Pearson for this one. Now K-12 testing, different story maybe.
Good luck to your son. IT can be a rewarding career path.
The following is from Is the Digital Revolution Turning Education Into a Ponzi Scheme? (by Chet Bowers)
“public school and higher education have become part of a Ponzi scheme that serves the interests of the cadre of computer scientists, technologists and venture capitalists whose understanding of progress did not include the need to understand the different cultures into which their technologies are introduced.”
“The myth of social progress that was a source of hope for individuals has now been reduced to the new myth of technological determinism that serves the interests of computer scientists, technologists, venture capitalists and ideologues in the larger society. With the merging of neo-social Darwinism and technological determinism that are now central features of the digital revolution, students hoping to find meaningful long-term employment and the opportunity to pursue a career and practice a craft are simply driven by forces now out of their control.”
He who has the most DATA. has the power and control. They win!
The 1% of 1% financed corporations are strategically choking the life out of our nation, and everything we THINK we stand for. We keep saying that “we are better than that”, for many changes in the US. Are we really?
We have allowed this takeover and total infiltration to take place, possibly beyond a point of no return.
Stasi tactics are not new in history. By the time we connect most dots, we have no way out. The turn this country is taking is frightening…and no one listens to correct the
full-speed-ahead ship. The master plan has been written!
They only thing that will change is that we will have even more billionaires ahead. They are on a feeding frenzy. We are their breakfast, lunch & dinner.
“With the fact that while I was intensely skeptical of edTPA from the start, I worked diligently to “get up to speed” and revised our curriculum and program to meet the demands of edTPA despite the fact that the vast majority of our master’s degree students are already certified and do not have to submit a portfolio?”
Now why the hell would someone do that????
Is it ASS* or GAGA**? Poor fellow might have even had both at the same time, a GAGA ASS. According to the DSM the rates of suffering in this country for each is around 99%.
*ASS = American Sheople Syndrome
**GAGA = Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution*** upon their passing from this realm.
***Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
Why would he do that? Because his students who have not been certified have to take the damn thing!
What really gets me (beyond the very existence of edTPA) is the obvious inferiority of scoring protocols. He received praise for being the best scorer they ever had, and then one of his own students can’t pass it. They call it objective because the scorer is following a canned rubric and is not influenced by any knowledge of the candidate. Seriously?!
And so EdTPA gets their own float in the endless parade of reform FAILURE.
Can anyone name just one reform idea, one reform policy, or one reform program that is working to improve teaching and learning?
Just one?
Let me swim upstream again. I assume the State of NY choose to use edPTA? And Pearson delivers and scores the tests? Is the problem with edPTA, or with Pearson, or both? Where should the anger be directed? At edPTA, State of NY, or Pearson, or all three?
NoReform, all three.
Pearson for having the arrogance to believe new teachers could be certified from afar. EdTPA for its inadequacies. The State Education Department for imposing the Pearson test. Watch the Regents. The new board is reviewing this mess. They know it is wrong.
Dearest Dr. Ravitch:
Your website is the BEST PLATFORM for all educators in North America and soon to be in worldwide to connect one to another.
My mother had told me more than 50 years ago that people who do not have human conscientiousness will harm and damage human civilization regardless of ideology they believe in.
99.9 % business minded people are people without human conscientiousness. The other 0.1 % business minded people donate their wealth to education and religion before their death.
According to the article on NYT dated April 30, 2016, by Vivian Yee, “”From Albany to Prison: Ex-Lawmakers on Life Behind Bars””
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/nyregion/from-albany-to-prison-ex-lawmakers-on-life-behind-bars.html?emc=edit_th_20160501&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=69487484&_r=0
Efrain González Jr., a once-powerful Bronx politician stated that “It is a recurring theme.”
There are all educated, intelligent lawyers, but black, both female and male. We can learn lesson from them before they might be killed in jail.
Therefore, educators are THE LAST BATCH of educated and civilized authority to be bullied by heartless, soulless and money minded business empire class.
There is still a hope if you and all angels (conscientious veteran educators, retirees, experts in this forum) unite behind Senator Bernie in this 2016 presidential election if Bernie runs as an independent candidate, NOT GREEN PARTY.
Hopefully, Bernie appoints you to be State Secretary of DOE so that you can elect all the best Chancellors, Superintendents from all experts and retirees in educational field.
American education is blessed to have you and all conscientious educators in this forum to fight for the survival and revitalization for American Public Education = Democracy for all.
Very respectfully yours,
May King
Thank you, May King. I am lucky to have a caring reader such as you. Thank you for your generous words and your support for the Network for Public Education.
Pearson is the target of criticism of the edPTA, but the real culprit is that should be given attention is the lead developer, and it is NOT Pearson.
The lead developer for edPTA was The Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE). “
Stanford University owns the intellectual property rights and trademark for edTPA. SCALE is responsible for all edTPA development including candidate handbooks, scoring rubrics, and the scoring training design, curriculum and materials (including benchmarks). SCALE also develops and vets edPTA support materials in the Resource Library and through the National Academy.” http://edtpa.aacte.org/faq
Stanford University has an agreement with Evaluation Systems, a unit of Pearson, licensing Pearson to administer and distribute edTPA.
So, if you have complaints about edTPA, the target should not just be Pearson, but SCALE at Stanford University, where the edPTA was first envisioned as comparable to tests given in the professions of law and medicine indicating “readiness” to practice as a professional.
SCALE as a big fan of so-called performance assessments. The SCALE website lists these ” partners.”
1. American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. AACTE “coordinates overall project management and communication and provides implementation support to participating institutions of higher education (IHEs) through a website, resource library, and an online community.
2. Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) provides technical assistance and professional development to schools, districts, and state boards of education. CEE and SCALE are working with the Innovation Lab Network (ILN) of twelve states “taking action to identify, test, and implement student-centered approaches to learning that will transform our public education system.” The CCSSO (see below) facilitates this work, organized around “shared principles, known as the six critical attributes” for innovation: including: Fostering world-class knowledge, skills; Student agency; Performance-based learning: Anytime/anywhere opportunities: Providing comprehensive systems of learner support.
In other words, anytime/anywhere online learning.
3. Council of the Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and SCALE have partnered on the National Quality Assessment Project and the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium. The CCSSO played a major role in launching the Common Core State Standards. It receives generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
4. Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) and SCALE work on College and Career Readiness research and tools for high school/college alignment especially state-of-the-art, criterion-based, standards-referenced methods of course and document analysis.
5. Envision Schools/Envision Learning Partners, a charter management company in the San Francisco Bay Area, operates four Arts and Technology High Schools. SCALE helped to design, develop, and promote their College Success (Digital) Portfolio System with performance outcomes, scoring rubrics, and tasks in ELA, mathematics, science inquiry and science literacy, history-social science, foreign language, and the arts.
6. Evaluation Systems, a Group of Pearson, is the operational partner for edTPA. Evaluation Systems provides the infrastructure and technical platform to collect, score, and deliver edTPA results to teacher candidates and preparation programs.At last report, 18,000 teachers took the test. Each paid a minimum of $300. It is unknown what Stanford and/or SCALE may receive for this use of their intellectual property.
7. Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC). SCALE has created “a rigorous jurying process for LDC curriculum modules” for the Common Core; a standard, accurate process for reviewing modules and “providing teachers with actionable feedback for revision; training in this process in support of “calibration around the quality of teacher work.”
8. Measured Progress is a not-for-profit testing company with statewide assessment contracts in over half of the states. For the past decade and a half, Measured Progress has operated alternate assessment programs for students with moderate to severe learning disabilities, in more states than any other company. It operates a Common Core Assessment Program and conducts R& D work with SCALE on scoring performance assessments.
9. Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) This is a consortium of 32 pre-service teacher preparation programs that contribute annually to ongoing improvements in an “alternative” for the state-mandated performance assessment needed to qualify for a preliminary teaching credential.
10. ShowEvidence works with SCALE on refining the practice of submitting and rating artifacts to support student and teacher assessment and evaluation.
11. Silicon Valley Math Initiative works with SCALE on student performance assessment projects in mathematics in Ohio and New York City. They have also worked with SCALE to design and develop performance outcomes, scoring rubrics, scoring protocols, and performance assessment tasks.
12. Teachscape has a contract with SCALE to develop and field test a tier II teacher licensing system in Ohio. Teachscape served as the management lead for the Gates-funded Measuring Effective Teachers project of which SCALE is a partner. (The MET Project, nothing to brag about, is critically examined here http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013)
13. Westat collaborates with SCALE on The Common Assignment Study, a three-year effort to promote a common methodology for teaching the college and career readiness standards in Colorado and Kentucky, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Participating teachers develop and teach two units, incorporating common performance tasks for students.
14. WestEd and SCALE are providing professional development in multiple states to build educator assessment literacy, especially performance tasks to support instruction for college and career readiness and success. This includes project includes work to “train the trainers” for professional development.
I have edited these descriptions of partnerships for length.
It is clear that SCALE is functioning as an R&D lab and promoter of the Common Core, College and Career agenda along with modular curricula and assessments for so-called personalized learning.
SCALE is very much a promoter of the Gates version of “reform,” and the focus on Pearson’s highly questionable edPTA should not leave SCALE and Stanford off the hook.
Thanks for the clarification.
And yet it is Pearson that ultimately determines who passes and fails. Pearson, with assistance of other developers, believes it should have a monopoly on teacher certification.
The professor/ student experience reminds me a lot of the switch my local hospitals made to hospitalists about 7 yrs ago during the yrs my eldest’s chronic disease worsened & resulted in a series of hospitalizations.
Hospitalists are gen practitioners & strangers to patient & case but they are the ones assessing you from the moment you arrive. They are responsible for admitting & directing treatment for everybody on the floor, & they rotate duty every couple of days (each time you answer the same questions again, getting perhaps different directions than the day before).
Medicine/ health, another public good under attack by bus mgt data-crunchers seeking ‘efficiency’ since the late ’80’s.
You find your gp & specialists by trial & error, & stick w/the best ones. They, like the professor, come to have a nuanced & intimate knowledge of their patients over the yrs.
Then suddenly, when the chips are down (patient has a crisis– or student takes EdTPA), they (GP’s) no longer have hospital privileges at all, or (specialists) can only be called in by the hospitalists. Should you have the misfortune of an ER visit, you have to jump thro hoops to get a bed & finally see your specialist a day or two later after which many mishaps may have occurred (despite monitoring by caregiver, holding 4-pp of history & meds, trying to head off crucial med errors as you are switched from one floor/ nurse to another [for efficiency’s sake] each of whom has to re-enter all data in computer…]
Anyone w/mental illness has dealt w/this from the get-go: your longtime psychiatrist has neither priveleges nor consult w/psych hosp in a crisis. You will be locked down & fed meds that your own psychiatrist has already trialed & rejected because they do not work for you or even cause serious physical side effects; you will simply be fed the meds according to a protocol corrupted by big pharma (e.g., no cheap unpatented lithium for you, you must take the latest expensive anti-psychotics despite your history: should you or your caregiver object you are marked as non-compliant.)
And now the same beast slouches toward Bethlehem to devour public education at its root, the ed colleges…
“So, if you have complaints about edTPA, the target should not just be Pearson, but SCALE at Stanford University, where the edPTA was first envisioned as comparable to tests given in the professions of law and medicine indicating “readiness” to practice as a professional.”
Pearson was critical to this relationship, I imagine. I doubt Stanford has the wherewithal to market edTPA so successfully. I’m sure they are hoping to rake in a healthy chunk of cash if Pearson can manage to spread this cancer throughout the country. I don’t remember that either law or medicine requires their candidates to go through such an exercise, and the edTPA does nothing that a good teacher education program doesn’t already do under supervision of people who actually know the candidates. Of course, if our career could lead to a six figure income in less than twenty five or thirty years (and I would guess the majority of teachers do not reach that milestone ever) perhaps a $300 performance review by complete strangers…no, I can’t see ever having someone unfamiliar with the candidate or the classroom giving a judgement that should decide whether someone should be credentialed. If Stanford was truly interested in improving the quality of teacher candidates, they could have published a study through the academic community for its use and review. They have done nothing but package currently used practices. Instead they chose to go with a juggernaut approach in the hopes of a generous financial return.
Thank you 2old2teach for your absolutely accurate analysis.
Stanford professors who prepare and publish CCSS and EdPTA are being paid for their works. It is exactly the same for Chetty of Harvard, David Colman, and many more educational retirees/experts, like Mr. Green of Educator Website for Gates, or Mr. Michael Barber for Pearsons…
Greed and control from business minded group are like cancer that destroys civilization, disrupts harmony in the environmental climate, and causes chaos/war on Earth. Back2basic.
You can send a letter to NYS legislators about eliminating the edTPA requirement through this link: http://uupinfo.org/legislation/advocate.php
Only takes a minute!