The AFT’s proposal for the development of a universal assessment of new teachers’ performance, “aligned with what new teachers need to know and be able to do,” is a welcomed call that validates efforts well underway among teacher educators. The creation of a nationally accessible performance assessment for beginning teachers, edTPA, was initiated by Stanford University and AACTE, and it is the product of collaboration among educator preparation professionals, practicing PK-12 teachers and other education experts. In fact, edTPA is aligned with the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) standards, and other professional standards, including the Common Core and Specialized Professional Association (SPA) standards. Currently, 24 states and the District of Columbia have institutions of higher education participating in edTPA. The recent AFT report does signal the need to bring the broader professional community, teacher educators, practicing teachers, administrators, and others into a conversation about how to support an assessment like edTPA so that it is serving the public, as well as the profession.

In some states, a broad range of stakeholders are already on-board and have implementation policy in place concerning edTPA. For example, some states are requiring it as a step toward graduation and/or licensure. Other states have policy pending, while some have preparation programs that are participating in the field tests and building conversations with decision-makers across their education systems. In all cases, edTPA is meant to be part of a larger, multiple-measure assessment system that demonstrates whether a teacher candidate meets a state’s particular requirements and has the pedagogical content knowledge and skills to support student learning in PK-12 classrooms. This knowledge and skill set includes developing instruction that supports student learning of academic language, utilizing asset models and strategies to design instruction that meets the needs of diverse learners, and assessing student understanding of content. We like to talk about edTPA as a performance-based measure for a performance-based profession.

edTPA captures professional consensus on the common body of knowledge and skills that beginning teachers should possess before they enter a classroom as a professional practicing teacher. Additionally, this knowledge is being reliably measured through a calibrated and consistent scoring and reporting system that teacher preparation programs and states need in order to use edTPA as a tool for quality and for change.

edTPA provides a common framework for states, school districts and educator preparation programs to define and measure beginning teaching performance. As states reference data generated from this tool to inform teacher licensure and recruitment, they will establish a national standard for relevant and rigorous practice that advances teacher candidate learning.

With that said, this process embodies something much more than a measure of content knowledge sought through paper and pencil tests. Rather, edTPA seeks to understand and measure a candidate’s actual abilities by offering both faculty members and candidates the chance to see candidates’ teaching skills in action. This happens through the collection and analysis of a variety of teaching artifacts such as lesson plans, discussion of the decisions one would make in certain classroom situations, and reflection on video clips of classroom practice.

The development of edTPA as an assessment of beginning teachers owes much to the contributions of PK-12 partners. And, the continuing evolution of teacher performance assessment requires continued collaboration between higher-education-based educator preparation programs and PK-12 schools and districts; there cannot be either/or distinctions of whether higher education or PK-12 is responsible for such important endeavors. edTPA continues to be fine-tuned based on field-testing to best reflect what teachers, principals and other education professionals want to see teachers doing well in schools – supporting the learning of diverse groups of students and teaching with rigor. AACTE is working at the national level and through our state chapters to encourage more inclusive conversations between higher education and PK-12 around Common Core State Standards implementation, and we are determined to lead by example.

What I am most proud of with edTPA is that it is a clear example of the profession holding itself accountable to national standards and to its own performance. Educator preparation has often been criticized for not providing adequate information about candidate capabilities. edTPA is undeniable evidence that the profession is answering this charge with a modern, valid and reliable assessment tool. The AFT report confirms that other national organizations share a similar vision with AACTE and the broader education community. At this moment, we have important opportunities to strengthen the collaboration between higher education and PK-12 around solutions such as edTPA. I am looking forward to further conversations with the AFT to put these plans in motion.

Not only does a true professional certification process for teachers make sense, it is long overdue.

For too long, we have tolerated a hodge-podge of teacher licensing and certification requirements across states and within states. In some places, a potential teacher must have a master’s degree in education before applying for a license. In other places, a person needs only a bachelor’s degree (in any subject) and as little as three weeks of summer boot camp to be placed in full charge of students.

The call by the AFT task force is just the latest in a growing consensus among educators of the need to make teaching a true profession. I have been fortunate to be part of many of these studies and discussions. For example, in November 2010, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) issued the report of a blue-ribbon commission representing teachers, parents, higher education, state and local school administrators, researchers, and policymakers. The Commission called for more rigorous teacher candidate selection and preparation noting, “The nation needs an entire system of excellent programs, not a cottage industry of path-breaking initiatives.” The 2012 book, The American Public School Teacher, in which a broad range of education commentators reflect on 50 years of teacher survey data, highlights the growing support among teachers for ideas such as performance pay and peer evaluation.

It is also worth noting that the membership and leadership of the much-maligned teacher unions have been at the forefront of these calls. Earlier this year, NEA released the report of a similar task force (Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching) advocating for “collective accountability and collaborative autonomy.” Specifically, the 21-teacher Commission argued for the creation of national teacher standards and for “one national umbrella group” that would “lead to preparation, licensure, and certification processes that are consistent, efficient, and cost effective.” At the other end of the career spectrum, we teachers on that Commission also recognized the need for “an evidence-based, peer review teacher evaluation system.” Tying teacher evaluation to the Common Core State Standards specifically, may be premature and unwise, given that the CCSS are just the most recent in a series of standards, and these have yet to be implemented and proven in the field.

The creation of a true teaching profession will require cooperation among the many education stakeholders, but it is clearly possible and necessary for our children’s sake. Moreover, Americans have shown consistently they are willing to pay for quality education for our children. Raising the overall quality and status of the teaching profession, lays the necessary moral and economic groundwork for more appropriate professional compensation.

Cross-posted at TeachMoore.

Posted last week on Flypaper.

As President of the AFT, the late Albert Shanker was instrumental in creating the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and much else in the education-reform world. Now Randi Weingarten is trying—earnestly and imaginatively—to return the organization and its (present) leader to the pantheon of real reformers.

Their new and much-ballyhooed proposal, contained in a report titled Raising the Bar, revives the Shanker-era idea of a “bar exam” for entering teachers—and charges the NBPTS with putting it into practice.

Andy Rotherham came out within hours with multiple doubts, some of which worry me, too. But let’s start by crediting Ms. Weingarten and her organization with a serious proposal to raise standards for new teachers as part of a broader effort to strengthen the profession.

Their proposal has three pillars. The second—but most important so far as I’m concerned— is this:

Teaching, like other respected professions, must have a universal assessment process for entry that includes rigorous preparation centered on clinical practice as well as theory, an in-depth test of subject and pedagogical knowledge, and a comprehensive teacher performance assessment.

My eye went immediately to the phrase “in-depth test of subject…knowledge,” and I combed the rest of the document seeking more on that topic—only to be dismayed by how little is actually said on the matter, other than that the NBPTS is supposed to figure it out. There is no hint of what in-depth knowledge might mean for a U.S. history teacher versus a geometry teacher versus an art teacher, nor does it address what sort of testing arrangement might gauge whether an individual possesses enough of it. (We know that the current arrangement—with most states relying heavily on the “Praxis II” test—does not do this well. We also know that some states do not take this issue on at all.)

The other two pillars, I have to admit, gave me pause. The first says “all stakeholders must collaborate”—a recipe for stasis and mediocrity if I’ve ever seen one. And the third assigns “primary responsibility for setting and enforcing the standards of the profession” to “members of the profession—practicing professionals in K–12 and higher education.” In other words, elected officials, employers, taxpayers, and parents can jolly well butt out; the standards governing classroom entry are none of their business. (I guess that’s true for think-tankers, too.)

Back to the “universal assessment”: I can easily understand why the AFT is giving that assignment to the NBPTS, but I’m not sure that organization is up to it—particularly the “knowledge” part. They administer very elaborate and expensive appraisals of teaching practice to veteran classroom practitioners, but I’ve never seen the National Board show much interest in subject-matter knowledge. Pedagogy, yes. Even lesson-planning. But not the causes and consequences of the Civil War or the ways that atoms combine to form molecules. Indeed, I’ve seen scant evidence that the powers-that-be at NBPTS even care much about such mundane stuff as content knowledge. (This part of the job, at least for grades K–8, should have been assigned to the Core Knowledge Foundation).

All of which is to say, the devil lurks prominently in details that are yet to be developed, not in the impulse to raise entry standards for teachers. (Unsurprisingly, this union-developed proposal deals only with new teachers, not with whether veteran instructors need to meet any standards of any sort.)

The Rotherham critique includes four more notable points.

• Is the AFT plan—billed as “leveling the playing field”—really just a sneak attack on Teach for America and other “alternative” routes into a fast-decentralizing profession? Excellent question.
• “What if we don’t know as much as we like to presuppose?” In a few subjects and grade levels, there is bona fide research-based knowledge and best-practice tradecraft. But “what truly makes a great 10th grade English teacher or 12th grade government teacher?” asks Andy. Another solid question.
• “For state policymakers, how demanding teacher tests are is as much, often more, a labor-market issue than it is an educational one.” A legitimate concern, indeed. It’s far easier to find (and pay for) a top-notch algebra teacher to fill an opening in Boston or Austin than in the Mississippi delta or rural Idaho. That’s why states have long been free to determine their own certification norms and Praxis passing scores. Can a field this big and diverse truly accommodate a single “high bar”? (This is so for other fields, too, which is why it’s easier for newly minted attorneys to pass the bar exams of some states than others.)
• Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, what if “education isn’t really like law or medicine,” but more like business or journalism (or think-tankery), where “credentials are valued but weighted alongside other factors because there isn’t a field-wide core of knowledge or skills all practitioners must have?” Rotherham is not entirely correct on this one, however. Law and medicine do have “field-wide” cores of knowledge but only up to a point. Intellectual-property lawyers and personal-injury ambulance chasers don’t have a whole lot in common, nor do ophthalmologists and gastro-enterologists.

Some of these are unanswerable within the framework of the AFT proposal and the NBPTS, the more so once it rounds up “all stakeholders.” But let’s not doom this baby at birth. Let’s welcome its arrival, wish it good health, cross our fingers (maybe even help if asked), and stand by ’til it can walk by itself. Thanks, Randi, for a proposal that would make Al proud—and that could conceivably do American education some good. Or could just as easily create nothing except false hope and, possibly, some damage.