To Earn Classroom Certification, More Teaching and Less Testing

By AL BAKER, The New York Times, 30/7/2012

New York and up to 25 other states are moving toward changing the way they grant licenses to teachers, de-emphasizing tests and written essays in favor of a more demanding approach that requires aspiring teachers to prove themselves through lesson plans, homework assignments and videotaped instruction sessions.

The change is an attempt to ensure that those who become teachers not only know education theories, but also can show the ability to lead classrooms and handle students of differing abilities and needs, often amid limited resources.

It is also a reaction to a criticism of some teachers’ colleges, which have been accused of minting diplomas but failing to prepare teachers for the kind of real-world experience where creativity and flexibility can be the keys to success.

The new licensing standards will be required next year in Washington State and have been committed to in Minnesota. New York will impose the new standards starting in 2014 with the estimated 62,000 students expected to graduate with teaching degrees.

Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee are also moving toward mandating the new assessment in the coming years, and about 20 other states are testing it through pilot programs to determine if they will ultimately use it.

“We don’t want to know if you can pass multiple-choice tests,” said Stephanie Wood-Garnett, an assistant commissioner in the New York State Education Department’s office of higher education. “We want to know if you can drive.”

Although there are myriad paths to becoming a teacher in New York, candidates typically must complete a state-approved undergraduate program, majoring in the candidate’s chosen subject, and pass three state tests. Candidates also usually meet some type of student-teaching requirements. Others can accomplish the same requirements in an approved master’s degree program.

The new assessment system replaces two of the three written exams, made up of multiple-choice questions and essays, and introduces the classroom assessment elements.

“It will be harder to meet the passing threshold,” said John B. King, the state’s education commissioner. “You will have to demonstrate more content knowledge.”

But critics are dubious that the new assessment system will produce better teachers and said that imposing a standardized program on education schools undermines their autonomy in preparing teachers. They also fear that the schools may have no choice but to adapt their curriculums to the new standards.

The model for evaluating educators, known as Teacher Performance Assessment, was designed by Stanford University, with input from more than 600 educators, including university professors, across the country. In New York, the system will be introduced in the fall at all 130 education schools and colleges that award teaching degrees.

“It is very analogous to authentic assessments in other professions, in nursing, in medical residencies, in architecture,” said Raymond L. Pecheone, a professor of practice at Stanford who leads the center that developed the new assessment. “In its most basic form, we collect authentic artifacts of teaching that all teachers use on the job.”

Under the system, a teacher’s daily lesson plans, handouts and assignments will be reviewed, in addition to their logs about what works, what does not and why. Videos of student teachers will be scrutinized for moments when critical topics — ratios and proportions in math, for instance — are discussed. Teachers will also be judged on their ability to deepen reasoning and problem-solving skills, to gauge how students are learning and to coax their class to cooperate in tackling learning challenges.

Linda Darling-Hammond, an expert on teacher education at Stanford who led President Obama’s education policy transition team, said the new evaluation methods were critical to any classroom reform efforts.

“Teaching is action work,” Ms. Darling-Hammond said. “You have to make a lot of things happen in a classroom with a lot of kids, effectively. You cannot just have book learning. It is not enough to pass a paper-and-pencil test, or even to have taken a bunch of classes in an education program. You have to be able to demonstrate whether you can actually teach.”

The new certification system comes at a time when the performance of teachers is being much debated and more closely linked to the success of schools. The new teacher assessments, which were adopted in March by New York’s Board of Regents, have also been included in the state’s application for federal grants, under the Race to the Top competition.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers’ union, said he supported making teacher licensing requirements more stringent, saying the prevalence of rookie teachers leaving schools of higher education “unprepared to teach is one main reason our attrition rate is so high.”

“We have to train teachers better,” he said.

But a top official of the state’s union was more skeptical. The official, Maria Neira, a vice president at New York State United Teachers, said college educators did not oppose a more rigorous evaluation system, but resented what they considered a process of carrying it out that was “driven by” politics and that left them excluded from any meaningful input.

“It erodes the role of what professors do, which is create curriculum, create that coaching model,” Ms. Neira said. “Who is going to grade the process? How will you ensure it will be done in a way that is fair and equitable for all candidates?”

The new system will require teachers to electronically submit their work, including the videos, for grading by trained evaluators who have been recruited by the education company Pearson.

Last month, some of the skepticism about the assessment was evident after a presentation by Mr. Pecheone and Ms. Wood-Garnett to college educators at the City University of New York.

“Our decisions are being outsourced,” said one faculty member at a state university in New York who supervises student teachers and asked not to be identified because she feared retribution from her employer. She said other educators in the audience that day also expressed concern that the new evaluation system would undermine their role in supervising aspiring teachers.

Some of that sentiment has been exhibited in Massachusetts, which is testing the new licensing procedure. At the University of Massachusetts, 67 of the 68 students in a program for future middle and high school teachers refused to submit two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching, as well as a 40-page take-home test. The students said that evaluators chosen by Pearson were not qualified to judge their abilities, and should not be allowed to do so over their own professors.

Because the new assessment programs are not yet in place, data about what kind of teachers they produce is a long way from being available. In California, a similar assessment system for granting new teaching licenses was started a decade ago, but the one being adopted in New York and the other states is newer and has different elements, including a new grading system.

One study of California’s evaluation system, Mr. Pecheone said, indicated that high performance on the assessments corresponded to higher standardized test scores.

About 100,000 teachers in the United States — 2.5 percent of all the country’s teachers — already have undergone a more grueling and elaborate evaluation process in earning certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which is akin to becoming a board-certified pediatrician or accountant, said Ronald Thorpe, the board’s president.

A number of studies done for the national board, he said, have found a statistically significant and positive relationship between a teacher’s performance on assessments to receive national board certification and a student’s achievement.

“Across the full spectrum of a teacher’s career,” Mr. Pecheone said, “there is growing evidence teachers who perform well on these assessments have students who outperform students whose teachers do less well on them.”

Supporters of the new assessment say that unveiling it in so many states will yield a broad picture of what good teachers need to know and how it can help their students raise their performance.

“The teacher is central because he or she is where the rubber hits the road,” said Mary Diez, dean of the school of education at Alverno College in Wisconsin, one of the states piloting the assessment system. “The teacher’s relationship with the kids, and as manager of their learning experiences, is key for better or for worse.”