The role of edTPA in improving teaching

On Board Online • December 15, 2014

Merryl Tisch
Chancellor, Board of Regents

The most important thing we can do in the classroom for our students is make sure that they have an excellent teacher in front of it. That starts with improving how we prepare new teachers.

Excellent teacher preparation is the hallmark of countries where young people are outpacing our own, such as Finland and South Korea. Here in the U.S., a powerful consensus has emerged that we need to do more, including ensuring that our teacher education programs are producing graduates who are well-prepared to take challenging jobs and help their students succeed in the classroom and beyond. In late November, the U.S. Department of Education announced that states will be required to develop systems to rate and track their teacher preparation programs.

In New York, the quality of teacher preparation has been a focus of the Board of Regents for years. In 2009, we approved a program to upgrade the examinations for potential teachers. We began to develop a new performance assessment in addition to three academic and subject matter-specific exams already mandated - a truly comprehensive assessment of teachers' readiness to succeed in the classroom.

This effort dovetailed with a recommendation by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Education Reform Commission that the state create a "bar exam" for prospective teachers and principals. The state's 2013 budget was enacted with a provision requiring development of such an exam.

New York's new performance-based assessment, called edTPA, was developed by researchers at Stanford University and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, along with educators involved in the creation of the widely recognized National Board Certification process. Like National Board Certification, the edTPA grades students on a range of work, including a video of the candidate actually teaching in the classroom. We field-tested the performance-based assessment of new teacher candidates twice in 2011, and we allocated substantial Race to the Top funding to help with assimilation of the new requirements at SUNY and CUNY schools, as well as the independent schools of the Commission of Independent Colleges and Universities). In 2012, the Regents pushed back the edTPA implementation timeline by one year, to May 2014.

This past school year was the first year that student teachers in New York were required to pass the edTPA. We now have the results: 81 percent of potential teachers passed.

That's a drop in the passing rate of nearly 20 percent, compared to the previous two years - sobering. The truth is, teaching isn't for everyone - as any classroom veteran will tell you - and being more selective benefits everyone. A more rigorous certification process ensures that only excellent instructors can teach in our public schools. And because teacher education programs will lose their accreditation if their failure rates are too high, it also ensures that our college programs will be held accountable.

So where do we go from here? To support implementation of the new standards, the Regents are calling on schools of education in public and private colleges to take meaningful steps in three areas.

First, they should re-evaluate their admissions standards and course offerings in light of this year's results on both the edTPA and new content exams.

Second, they should deepen their partnerships with school districts to implement year-long, substantive teaching residencies.

Third, programs should shift their student teaching placements away from the over-saturated elementary market and toward areas of higher need, like ESOL/bilingual education, students with disabilities, and secondary STEM.

The Board of Regents can and will use its approval authority to compel action here, but we shouldn't need to. Producing the most talented, best- equipped teachers in the world should be a goal that we all share.

We know that change can be hard, but we also know that this kind of realignment of how new teachers are prepared - together with the strengthened assessment regime - will result in better outcomes for the education workforce and, more importantly, for the needs of our P-12 students. That, after all, is what the reform effort is all about.