With all the concern about today's education largely generated by the new Common Core Curriculum Standards, what seems to be overshadowed is perhaps the most important part of the education equation, namely, the teachers.
Having outstanding teachers is the key to the success for American education. The national discussion now focuses on how we can best train future teachers, and then assess their competence. These questions are highly relevant and the same time very challenging. The new Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), with all its good intentions, sadly contains too many flaws.
These flaws significantly damage the reliability and validity of this assessment, but also could have deleterious effects on candidates and, consequently, our future teaching force. This assessment is scheduled to become a mandated New York state assessment as of May 1.
Too many flaws
What could be bad about an assessment that observes a teacher in the classroom and evaluates a teacher's reasoning and comments about significant aspects of the teaching performance? In theory, this would produce a fine teacher assessment. Unfortunately, there are too many flaws in the current edTPA. Consider the following aspects of this assessment process:
• The candidate must submit a video recording of his or her teaching performance and can submit one of his or her choosing with no proctoring of this process. Moreover, there is no way to ensure that the person filmed is the candidate of record.
• A candidate, feeling pressured, may have another person write the required commentary on the video recording — again, no proctoring.
• The assessment may not have a clear account for validity or reliability — especially when determining the passing score. That is, how do we know that the test can predict future teaching effectiveness, as different student populations may require varying skill sets?
• The assessment may not take into account optimal teaching arrangements for varying subject areas. Furthermore, who determines what constitutes optimal teaching?
• The assessment leaves too much to chance and, by its very importance for the candidate's future, may overwhelm the student-teaching experience.
We already know from decades of research that student teaching (i.e., an internship) is the single most important part of teacher preparation, where everything learned in courses must be put into action coherently with real students, colleagues and parents. Adding the pressure of an additional high-stakes performance assessment (to the other numerous standardized tests that our teacher candidates must take) in the student-teaching semester means that all the important learning is overshadowed by the burdens of the test, from practical logistics to theoretical understandings.
Test offers little insight
This assessment doesn't provide any more information about a candidate than faculty already has, and that can be gleaned from program assessments and from ongoing observations of student teaching. Evaluations based on one lesson provide no more transparency about performance and classroom readiness, and perhaps far fewer insights.
The argument from the developers of the assessment that the edTPA is designed to take context into account still does not mean that there won't be a chance of considerable bias in the scoring process. There are already discussions about changing the scoring so that scorers become specialized in one task, which could mean the entire process loses its integrity. How can one person score task one, another task two and a third task three without considering how the pieces fit together? Variation of instructional style in one lesson is often a consideration for effective instruction. Such piecework evaluation is not only ineffectual, but could also present an entirely incorrect picture of the teacher candidate being assessed.
Curiously, teacher candidates are instructed not to copy any of their privately prepared electronic submission — this includes the video and the verbal commentary. However, there is nothing to prevent this copying and it being passed on to other candidates as a second submission by another person. As unethical as this would be, the very importance (and high cost — $300) of the test may encourage such action.
This is the dilemma that faces future teacher preparation using this newly developed edTPA. In addition to providing a proper time frame for teacher candidates to understand this entirely new evaluation system, I would hope that as we move forward to build truly strong teachers we would "clean up" these flaws before they damage the teacher candidates' future, and possibly our education system through a possibly inaccurate assessment instrument.
The writer is dean of Dobbs Ferry-based Mercy College's School of Education.