I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Documenting a Failed Attempt to Create an Alternative to the edTPA

• In Event: 29.045 - edTPA's Threats to Equity in Teacher Education: Policy Analysis at Statewide, Program, and Individual Levels

Abstract

This paper documents our experiences and lessons learned from a failed attempt to create an alternative to the edTPA. Prior to the 2016-2017 academic year, both across the state and within our university, the edTPA had not been mandated as a teacher licensure requirement; however, beginning with the 2012-2013 school year we did administer the edTPA to our students and provided local scoring paid for by our dean. Using local scoring of the edTPA meant our teacher candidates never paid the $300 fee or submitted their assessments to Pearson for national scoring. For the past five years, therefore, we have been either “piloting” the edTPA or using local scoring while the state Department of Education attempted to make a decision on whether or not to require the edTPA. Despite not formally accepting the edTPA, programs within our college used this time as a trial period; therefore, the requirements of the edTPA became a normal part of the everyday practices of many of the programs within our college.

Unlike our colleagues in this symposium, we were working in a state that has not mandated the edTPA. However, we found that the edTPA managed to become a normal part of the work of teacher education in many programs and was viewed by many of our colleagues as an effective way to determine if our candidates were indeed ready to teach. During the 2015-2016 school year, our teacher education office decided we would no longer do local scoring and created a $400 fee to cover the expense of the edTPA ($300) as well as additional college-wide expenses related to the edTPA ($100). In an effort to resist this push for national scoring, we decided to create an alternative assessment that was rigorous, reasonable to faculty to assess, and equitable to our teacher candidates. While our alternative assessment was met with some support it was ultimately rejected by our Dean and administrators within our college.

This paper is an attempt to document the efforts of a few teacher education faculty members who have worked on resisting the imposition of fees on our students for a service that they don’t ultimately need and the lessons learned from our failed attempt at creating an alternative assessment to the edTPA at our institution. Our paper will focus on the following lessons learned: 1. Administrators are afraid to go against the norm when it comes to resisting the edTPA given the fear of failing a CAEP review (even when we obtained “permission” and even encouragement from a CAEP official to use alternative assessments); 2. The trial period of using the edTPA led programs to focus specifically on positioning their candidates to pass the edTPA; 3. The majority of our colleagues do not view charging a $400 fee for an assessment that does not count as an equity issue; 4. We have found that our commitments to equity and social justice have become strengthened as a result of our attempts to resist implementation of the edTPA.

Authors

• Todd S. Hawley, Kent State University

• Lisa A. Borgerding, Kent State University

• William Kist, Kent State University