support is appropriate and allowed when dealing with the representation tensions
we describe, given restrictions that accompany the edTPA’s role as summative
licensure exam (Meuwissen and Choppin 2015 ). While local uses for the purposes
of formative assessment and program development might provide opportunities for
teacher educators and candidates to work through the challenges of representing the
psychological, moral, and logical dimensions of teaching together, a high-stakes
policy context leaves the process of linking tasks with an underlying construct of
teaching up to the novice teacher. Further, there is evidence that couching the
edTPA within an accountability discourse can marginalize certain
teacher-educational concerns—for instance, strong foci on understanding and
addressing educational inequities and social injustices—and reframe professional
practice as something that is highly controlled, rather than something that adapts to
ambiguity and change within the relationships among teacher, student, subject
matter, and social milieu.
In conclusion, it behooves us to continue looking hard, and in great detail, at the
ways assessment mechanisms like the edTPA operate on images of high-quality
teaching, and in turn, on networks of teachers, teacher educators, cooperating
teachers, and K-12 students. We mayfind that they work very differently in one
context—like program evaluation and reform—than they do in another—like
licensing teachers and sanctioning underperforming schools of education—and
thus, the ways stakeholders mediate those assessments could vary considerably
from place to place. We must be careful when conducting these analyses, for it is
tempting, given the edTPA’s current roles in state policy and its association with a
private company that manages the evaluation process, to impulsively connect the
assessment with nebulous critiques of neoliberalism and corporatization in public
education. But we also must be aware that it exists in the policy sphere on account
of longstanding assumptions that learners in the United States are neither college-
and career-ready nor particularly competitive on international achievement tests,
and that improving teaching quality by tightening teacher evaluation standards is a
pathway to solving that problem. That said, those who advocate for the edTPA as a
tool for recognizing high-quality teaching and strengthening teacher education
programming also must reconcile with its use as a new accountability lever within
an old kind of governmentality.
References
American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. (2015).edTPA participation map.
Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved June 11, 2015, fromhttp://edtpa.aacte.org/state-policy
Berliner, D. C. (2005). The near impossibility of testing for teacher quality.Journal of Teacher
Education, 56(3), 205–213.
Campbell, D. (1976).Assessing the impact of planned social change (Occasional paper #8).
Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Public Affairs Center.
Cochran-Smith, M., Piazza, P., & Power, C. (2013). The politics of accountability: Assessing
teacher education in the United States.The Educational Forum, 77(1), 6–27.
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