edTPA and The New Taylorism

• In Event: 63.052 - Reclaiming Teacher Performance Assessment: Findings From the New York edTPA Alternative Scoring Consortium

Abstract

Objectives
Although the Pearson-administered high-stakes teacher certification exam, edTPA, was supposed to be in place in New York State in May 2014, the New York State Board of Regents voted to postpone implementation until July 2015. Many teacher candidates already paid $300 to Pearson and completed the exam. As teacher educators, many of us are concerned about the implications of reducing teacher licensure to the results of one high stakes exam as well as contracting out the administration of this exam to a for-profit education company. High stakes tests have been shown to produce negative consequences such as teaching to the test, inordinate stress and test anxiety, cheating, and an imperfect picture of a candidate’s actual teaching ability. While the test adheres to a rubric that its designers claim is impartial, we wonder whether or how the exam will affect the important components of teaching such as social/emotional intelligence, rapport, cultural, racial, class and gender sensitivities, awareness of experiences of marginalization and exclusion in schools as well social justice education that we emphasize in our teacher education programs. Interviews with teacher candidates who have taken the exam as well as with teacher educators who have taught students who must prepare for the exam can illuminate how preparing for the edTPA exam has affected their teacher education process.

Perspectives
Constructivism, social justice and critical theory will be the theoretical paradigms we will use to explore the experiences of the teacher candidates and educators who have interfaced with the edTPA. In addition to reviewing what was gained through participation in the edTPA, we will interrogate the gaps and absences that it has fomented as well.

Methods
The data will be collected through interviews with faculty who compose our edTPA consortium, which includes faculty from eleven public and private college teacher education programs across New York State. In addition, we will interview teacher candidates who have agreed to participate in our participatory research action project from the same institutions as the consortium faculty.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/points of view
The results of this study intend to emphasize how preparation for the edTPA distorts the teacher training process. The conclusions will examine what gets left out, eliminated, deemphasized and neglected in teacher education as focus inevitably shifts to a do-or-die exam, both on the part of teacher educators and teacher candidates. We thus intend to call attention to the impacts of an exam that heretofore have not been studied, and how it affects teacher education.
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This investigation will perhaps be the first to explore the pedagogical effects of a new national teacher certification exam, one that for the moment is limited to one state, but has the potential to expand around the country. In this era of neoliberal reform and privatization of educational services, it is incumbent upon educational researchers to study the consequences of “contracting out” the licensure of our nation’s teachers in order to wage an effective resistance.

Author

• Laura Janet Kaplan, The Graduate Center, City University of New York