The Pearson teacher certification exam called EdTPA is e trembly controversial. Many teacher educators believe that it seeks to standardize teacher preparation and reduces the autonomy of those who know future teachers best: those who taught them.
Laura Chapman, retired arts educator and crack researcher, here explains the origins of EdTPA.
“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.”
This post simply cuts and pastes items from the SCALE site but is not really clear on the connections. Yes, SCALE owns the intellectual property rights for edTPA. And yes, they developed it. But let’s examine some of the other items. PACT (Performance Assessement for California Teachers) was created after California passed a senate law in 1998 requiring that all teacher candidates must pass a teacher performance assessment as a requirement for certification.. Stanford took the lead on PACT because they felt that the state recommended teacher performance assessment had numerous flaws (institutions had the choice to create their own AND show validity and reliability on their own assessment in order for it to be accepted by the state). SCALE took the lead on PACT and did this…edTPA stemmed from the work around PACT.
I can’t speak to the final quote about SCALE, Gates, reform, etc. However, I did want to be clear that PACT, and thus eDTPA, was a reaction to a state requirement about a teacher performance assessment. Through PACT, SCALE aimed to create a product that was of better quality in assessing teacher performance. Also important to note is that edTPA (and PACT) stem from the ideals behind National Board Certification, which for many years has been (and continues to be) considered a high benchmark of teacher quality.
“Also important to note is that edTPA (and PACT) stem from the ideals behind National Board Certification, which for many years has been (and continues to be) considered a high benchmark of teacher quality.”
From my vantage point as a teacher the NBC was and is a complete joke and waste of money. If a teacher isn’t doing what the “board” deems “excellent” he or she hasn’t been doing their job. Same with AP courses.
Educator wannabes attempting to be like the supposedly “more intelligent” professions of law or medicine (with a strong emphasis on the supposedly). Give me a break with their “superior” I’m board (yeah like stiff as a board or a board of wood) certified. What insane chutzpah.
jls
You are correct about the antecedent project, PACT, developed for/by 31 California institutions with thin trails of connection to Board Certification and other collaborative efforts to test teachers. AT last check, PACT had produced analysis of test reliability and validity in only six subjects. The “final passing” standard was determined in January of 2007. p. 48 http://www.pacttpa.org/_files/Publications_and_Presentations/PACT_Technical_Report_March07.pdf
California has four approved models for Teacher Preparation Program tests leading to a Preliminary Teaching Credential. The most recent, edTPA, was approved September 14, 2014, before the first multi-state use of edTPA was completed.
The first published report on the reliability and validity of edTAP offers an analysis of the test scores of 18,436 candidates who completed the edTPA in 27 “content” areas between January 1 December 31, 2014, the first operational year.“
This report, published September 2015, offers analyses intended to support its use as “as a measure of readiness to teach and a metric used to inform program approval or accreditation.” p. 4
The report makes it clear that the SCALE/Pearson edPTA test is intended to lead to the modification of teacher education programs, literally making them test-driven, while outsourcing assessments of teaching candidates in 27 subjects to Pearson.
Here is the mission of the SCALE/Pearson edPTA testing program.
“Unlike typical licensure assessments external to programs, edTPA is intended to be embedded in a teacher preparation program and to be “educative” for candidates, faculty, and programs. Candidates deepen their understanding of teaching through use of formative resources and materials while preparing for edTPA, and the score reports provide feedback on candidates’ strengths and challenges as they move forward into their first years of teaching. For faculty and programs, the various edTPA resources and candidate, program, and campus results can be used to identify areas of program strength and determine areas for curricular renewal.” p. 5. https://scale.stanford.edu/teaching/edtpa
The last paragraph about the intended use of the edPTA/Pearson/SCALE test is clear: The test is viewed as authoritatively “educative” for the hapless faculty who oversee and teach in deficient programs. The test will help them know their program strengths and need for “curriculum renewal.”
So, for the sake of preserving edTPA, faculty in teacher education are being asked to conform, focus on what the test requires, forego criticism and give-up academic freedom. Note that this test assumes that subject-centered instruction, focussed in aim and content on national standards is indisputably correct and exactly what teachers must address, with scoring on 13 to 18 rubrics.
The edPTA/Pearson/SCALE version of proper instruction needs to be challenged in order to prevent the ideological takeover of education by this test and supporters of it. The test is being hardwired into state policies in spite of known issues. What issues?
According to this report: There was lack of a sufficient number of test-takers in seven content fields for trustworthy inferences about reliability/validity: These fields are: agriculture, business, health, family and consumer, library specialist, technology/engineering.
There are also known “statistically significant” differences in scores that currently favor certain candidates. The test favors those who are presenting portfolios for an urban context over a rural context for teaching (p. 34); are self-identified as female over male (p. 36); have attained a doctoral degree—highest scores—also those with a bachelor’s degree/plus credits (but not a master’s degree /plus credits or high school graduate with some college (p. 37).
The point is that edTPA is a work in progress but currently used in 681 Educator Preparation Programs in 38 states and the District of Columbia. About 75% of tests for the analysis of reliability/validity came from only five states, with New York State the largest contributor (31%). https://secure.aacte.org/apps/rl/res_get.php?fid=2183&ref=edtpa
I am opposed to edPTA. I think that SCALE is trading on a “Stanford Brand” in order to promote test-driven and standardized teacher education. Many of the other projects with “partners, listed at the SCALE website, are clearly designed to promote the Gates-funded Common Core, the truncated view of education attached to it–“college and career” readiness, and “transformations” of education designed for online platforms.
The values and concepts about education embedded in edTPA are designed to distract attention from worthy alternatives, including those that provide an ample grounding in child study, historical and philosophical perspectives on teaching, some grasp of alternatives to the test-driven regime. Among these are Montessori education programs, the splendid vision of Deborah Meier, what teachers can and have learned from Maxine Greene, or Diane Ravitch, or for that matter the values and ideas of some of Stanford’s own–including the late Elliot Eisner.
Just a few comments: no where does the report state that teacher prep programs should only use Edtpa…in fact SCALE has said the opposite that Edtpa should be one measure..so having candidates do Edtpa is not outsourcing…it only is if a program chooses to not have observations (which in my opinion would be insane)
As for California’s original bill…isn’t a teacher performance assessment a better measure than a M/c exam like praxis? Should there be no external assessment at all?
As for teacher prep program changes…how’s u programs do you think often do the same thing year after year without critically looking at themselves? I’m not asking for a number, but do these programs exist? So why is it a bad thing to use results from an assessment to look at ways to improve?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
It is ironic that the EdTPA attempts to set higher standards for teachers at the same time states are reducing education requirements and coming up with watered down alternative routes to certification. Does the test include foundations of education and child development? Otherwise, from the description, it seems more like the GRE that I took many years ago. I feel sorry for young people that want to teach. They keep getting mixed messages from so many people that have inserted themselves into becoming a teacher. One connection that remains a constant is Gates’ meddling fingerprints always show up as the puppet master pulling the strings.
Conspicuously absent from the post is any mention of Linda Darling-Hammond, who is one of the people most responsible for the foisting of the EdTPA upon our teacher candidates. Why does she always seem to escape blame for this fiasco?
So glad I’m not the only one to say “the empress has no clothes.” As I wrote some years ago in an article in Rethinking Schools (“Coming soon to a teacher credential program near you…” ) Linda Darling-Hammond was the power behind the broad acceptance of PACT (the edTPA precursor). It was almost impossible to get any critiques of PACT published because of her support for it. The exception was Rethinking Schools, hardly an academic journal. As I also wrote in that article Ray Pecheone, now the Executive Director of the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) did some of the earliest so-called research “validating” PACT–according to Pecheone PACT scores of teachers were to be used to predict their student academic success. . At the time he was, I think, getting his PhD.
I have been saying for years, here and elsewhere, that Linda Darling-Hammond is no friend to teachers. Marzano and Danielson are direct descendants of her work.
See jlsteach comments above for the pathetic excuses always given in defense of her work, trying to spin this nonsensical hogwash as beneficial to the profession.
Teachers once again being told how we should do what we do by those with no experience or understwnding because they know better than we do and then dodging their failures with the ‘it’s better than nothing’ excuse.
Sickens me,
The Stanford University graduated Kim Smith, who is, IMO, ground zero for public school privatization. Her organizations, all of which receive Gates funding, Bellwether, Pahara Aspen Institute, New Schools Venture Fund ($22 mil.), and TFA (she’s a founding team member) are involved in “human capital pipeline design”, “a diverse supply of different charter school brands, on a large scale” and developing access to potential education decision-makers.
Reportedly, the wife of the US Secretary of Education is employed by Bellwether.
Philanthropy Roundtable boasts the California Bay area is epicenter of ed rephorm.
As a teacher educator with a strong background in induction and mentoring of new teachers, I have seen EdTPA divert student teachers from what should really be their focus, learning school culture, curriculum, high quality lesson planning, classroom management and, most importantly working with students. EdTPA would be good for teachers as they go for tenure. It is too labor intensive for the already challenging time of student teaching and first year of teaching. The developers should read the research on teacher development!
” EdTPA would be good for teachers as they go for tenure.”
NO, it wouldn’t. It’s a piece of shit test whose results have no validity whatsoever. See Noel Wilson if you don’t already understand-I’ll post a summary below in order to not Chiletize this answer.
Where is it possible for teachers to still go for tenure in this coumtry? Few places indeed I believe. Due process is on the endangered species list. Tenure is following the dodo bird out the door.
From Wednesday’s post on the re-election of Barbara Madeloni as president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association:
“Madeloni first rose to prominence in 2012 when she fought the EdTPA, the Pearson test required for certification. She refused to administer it to her students and lost her job (she later regained it, then took an unpaid leave, then lost it again, but may be rehire again, or maybe not.)
At that time, she said about teacher certification:
‘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.’ ”
Madeloni also called out Linda Dariling Hammond and Stanford for interfering in teacher preparation in this precisent article from 2012:
“The incursion of for profit companies into higher education occurs with willing collaborators. Whether misguided, fearful, subject to the lure of the advancement of their own careers, or standing to profit themselves we cannot know, but across the country faculty join administrators in advancing practices that open the door for the privatization of our work. The accountability regimes supported by accrediting agencies and professional organizations have become entryways for companies like Pearson, Inc. to not only sell their products, but to control our practices…
We are at a very dangerous time in the history of American public education. The forces of privatizing profiteering corporatists are moving to undo the foundations of a democracy—public education and public spaces. It is within these public spaces that we come to speak, to challenge, to listen, and to create our communities. Teachers and teacher educators work to help students learn how to explore these spaces, engage as citizens and community members. This democratic work is a messy human enterprise, varied, uncertain, fluid, and not contained within the rigors of standardization, rubrics, efficiency, pseudo-objectivity, corporate profits, or commodification. Indeed, it contradicts the very nature of public spaces and humane pedagogies to reduce teaching and learning to teach to the numbers of the edTPA rubric. The hard sell of the edTPA product and the silencing of faculty that is accompanying it tells us very clearly how far we have traveled from commitments to academic freedom, to uncertainty, and to public dialogues as critical to our work and our democracy.”
https://academeblog.org/2012/09/14/the-hard-sell-and-the-educator/
She is keenly aware of all the forces outside of the education community that want to shape and even control the teaching profession.
For Karen Peterson (and everyone else who hasn’t read it):
The EdTPA cannot escape its epistemological and ontological errors and falsehoods nor all of the psychometric “fudging” (stretching statistical data to show what one wants it to show) that Wilson, in his never refuted nor rebutted treatise, has shown to render any results COMPLETELY INVALID or as he states “vain and illusory”.
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
All of these people claim they are not trying to replace professional judgement, but by trying to standardize teaching, they call into question every professional judgement that does not conform to their rubric.
Exactly.