purposes of identifying and rectifying deficiencies within social systems. What has
become known as Campbell’s Law states that the more far-reaching an evaluation
tool is for decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and
the more likely it will be to distort the processes it is intended to monitor.
We believe that Goodlad’s and Campbell’s warnings remain prescient today, at a
time when the edTPA is touted by some state policy makers as a tool for halting
alleged educational failures and ensuring teacher accountability in American
schools. A former New York State Commissioner of Education, for instance,
suggested that the edTPA would serve a productive role in weeding undistinguished
teachers and teacher education programs out of the profession. Yet this particular
rationale for implementing the edTPA is conspicuously absent in SCALE’s and the
American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education’s (AACTE’s) discussions
of its potential uses, consequences, and benefits. In fact, at the 2014 annual meeting
of the American Educational Research Association, Linda Darling-Hammond, a
Stanford University faculty member and well-known proponent of the edTPA,
called New York State’s implementation model a case study in how not to carry out
the assessment. Further, it has been almost two decades since the standards
movement in American education began morphing into the accountability move-
ment, and thus far, the track record for using high-stakes assessments to improve
students’learning opportunities and teachers’practices is, itself, undistinguished.
The evidence we presented above demonstrates that New York and Washington
candidates’conceptions of teaching quality are at least somewhat contingent upon
what is named and prioritized in a high-stakes test that only partially captures the
construct’s dimensions. In light of this and other concerns, a robust discussion
among American teacher educators and researchers about the appropriate place of
TPAs in policy and practice is well underway. SCALE and AACTE persistently
have propped up the edTPA as a valid, research-based mechanism for bringing
teacher education institutions together around common standards and expectations
for teaching; and scholars affiliated with those organizations have published widely
on the benefits of edTPA for identifying high-quality practice and strengthening the
evidentiary grounds for improving teacher education programs (Peck et al. 2014 ).
But Cochran-Smith et al. ( 2013 ) explain that the policy contexts of the edTPA’s
implementation can overshadow the advantages of its use. They describe a situation
in their home state of Massachusetts—not a test adoption state, but one that par-
ticipated in nationwide piloting—in which teacher educators protested the propri-
etary nature of the assessment and the deprofessionalization associated with
restricting teacher educators’support roles and subcontracting the evaluation pro-
cess out to anonymous scorers working for a private entity. Cochran-Smith and
colleagues call this circumstance ironic, given that“many of those in favor of the
TPA as a national assessment...are leaders of the teacher education profession-
alization movement”(p. 18).
Let us look at this point by way of the question that centers our chapter: how
might the edTPA’s position in a policy context impact the ways candidates repre-
sent teaching within it? In New York and Washington, teacher educators, coop-
erating teachers, and candidates are exceedingly cautious about what and how much
606 K.W. Meuwissen and J.M. Choppin