During a recent teaching and learning conference in Washington, one high school student talked about why he wanted to be a teacher. The student, who was taking part in a panel at the event, also shared what happens when he tells his peers about his career ambition.
The standard response goes something like: “Why would you want to do that?”
It’s hard to imagine the same reply if the student were to say he wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer, or another type of professional whose career choice comes with built-in assumptions about the skills and prestige associated with it.
As national representatives of, respectively, school principals, school district administrators, and teacher-preparation programs, we believe it is essential to our nation’s well-being that the young man at the conference—and all future teachers—be lauded for their dream, respected for their choice, and successful in such a noble and challenging career.
That is why we are coming together to endorse one of the most important movements to come to teaching in generations. That movement is the rapid and forceful support for performance-based entrance—via assessment—for prospective educators seeking a teaching license.
The leaders of education preparation programs care deeply about their students and high-quality teaching. They want their candidates to succeed as teachers.
But as a field, it’s no longer enough to say that our standard for becoming a teacher is course completion and fill-in-the-bubble, subject-level tests. Neither of these traditional gateways to the profession provides demonstrated competence in core teaching skills.
The National Education Association is embarking on a campaign to ensure all new teachers are “profession ready” and endorses performance-based assessment. In 2012, the American Federation of Teachers called for an authentic assessment that could serve as the equivalent of a bar exam for entrance into teaching.
These are critical positions by organizations representing a majority of teachers—policy stands that are propelling the field forward.
Today, more than 500 institutions in 34 states and the District of Columbia are joining this effort and using the edTPA assessment, which was developed by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity, with the help of state officials and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The test is designed to help determine if prospective teachers are ready to enter the profession with the skills necessary to help all their students learn. Pearson is administering the edTPA, which launched last fall after two years of field-testing involving the scoring of more than 12,000 portfolios from teacher-candidates in 250 teacher-preparation programs.
Recently, the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) announced its own version of such an assessment, called the Praxis Performance Assessment for Teachers, which has been adopted by Missouri and will be widely available in fall 2014.
Our respective organizations welcome such preservice performance assessments as long as they reflect input from the field, meet rigorous standards of validity and reliability, and support research-based instructional practice. We look forward to helping shape and improve these and other performance-based assessments as they evolve.
Read the full article at Education Week.
Read more about the edTPA.
Here's identification of the authors of the above commentary: JoAnn Bartoletti is the executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in Reston, Va. Gail Connelly is the executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, in Alexandria, Va. Daniel A. Domenech is the executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, in Alexandria, Va. Sharon P. Robinson is the president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, in Washington.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
