From the Center for Investigative Reporting
by Jackie Mader

NORTHRIDGE, Calif. – It took less than a minute for Mario Martinez to finish the first six questions of the algebra exam that his professor, Ivan Cheng, had just handed to him. The high school-level test was supposed to be a good example of an exam so that the graduate students in Cheng’s math methods course at California State University, Northridge’s school of education would better understand what rigorous high school-level questions look like and how to write tests for their own lessons.

By the end of the first page, Martinez already had learned an important lesson: “Beware of redundant problems,” he scribbled on the side of his paper before flipping it over to finish the problems on the back.

Martinez has until the fall to hone his skills before he will be sent into a classroom to practice as a student teacher. And he has at least a year before he will have to prove that he can not only teach math, but also create tests and analyze student results. It is a skill that many educators say is a sign of a good teacher, and one so important it was included in a lengthy exit exam that all aspiring teachers must take before they receive a teaching credential from the state.  

Aspiring teachers videotape themselves teaching a lesson and write several lengthy reflections. California introduced the performance assessments in 2001 to adhere to a 1998 state law. Teachers must pass them in order to receive certification.

Every teacher preparation program in the state must choose one of three versions for students to take, each of which centers on teaching and self-reflection. The Performance Assessment for California Teachers, or PACT, is the test of choice for Northridge and more than 30 other teacher preparation programs in the state, and many classes, like Cheng’s math methods course, design curriculums around the assessment to ensure students are prepared to pass.

Although it is largely untested and debated among educators, the PACT has served as a model for a national exam, known as the edTPA, that at least 25 states are introducing. Developed by 12 California institutions in 2001, the PACT was put on hold when the state suspended the performance assessment requirement in 2003. Three years later, the requirement was reinstated, and in early 2007, the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing approved the assessment.  

The multipart test, which often takes a semester to complete and results in dozens of pages of essay reflections, tries to assess whether an aspiring teacher is able to teach multiple learners in real classrooms. It has been tapped as a nationwide model because supporters say it presents a complex picture of a candidate’s strengths, weaknesses and classroom readiness.   

But many educators hesitate to say that the new performance assessments are creating better teachers or that passing them is a sign that a teacher will be effective, partly due to the lack of more evidence.

Martinez says Cheng’s class has spent extra time on designing and grading tests for lessons they have created because it is typically “the part of the PACT that math teachers do the worst on.”

Some say this practice of designing teacher preparation curriculums around the PACT bears resemblance to K-12 teachers “teaching to the test.” But many educators at Northridge say the PACT is focused on critical areas of good teaching – like planning lessons with strong student assessments and modifying lessons for English-language learners and students with disabilities – and therefore reinforces what candidates should learn anyway.

“The PACT certainly has forced us to give greater attention to certain aspects of what it means to teach and to deliver a lesson more effectively,” said David Kretschmer, chairman of the Department of Elementary Education at CSU Northridge. “We are churning out a better product, if you use that expression, than before we adopted PACT.”

That was the intention of the PACT’s creators, educators from teacher preparation programs in California who wanted to ensure that all pathways to teaching in the state were centered on research-based teaching practices that would produce better teachers.

Some research has found that high scores on performance exams like the PACT may signify that a teacher will be more effective in the classroom. One study from Stanford University, which helped design the PACT, found that for each additional point an English language arts teacher scored on the exam, which is scored on a 44-point scale, students averaged a gain of 1 percentile point per year on California standardized tests. But the study looked at only 14 teachers and their 259 students.

If passing the PACT means teachers are prepared for the classroom, then by pass rates alone, it would indicate that programs using assessment are, for the most part, producing teachers ready for the challenges of the classroom. In the 2009-10 school year, 33 percent of aspiring teachers in the state applying for their credential took the PACT. Ninety-four percent of them passed all sections of the exam on the first try.

But according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the PACT’s pass rates are much higher than those on the California Teaching Performance Assessment, taken by a majority of teacher candidates in the state, and the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers, taken only by candidates at CSU Fresno. The CalTPA had the lowest pass rate, with 77 percent of candidates passing all sections of the exam on the first try. The FAST has a first-time pass rate of 87 percent.

The high pass rates have skeptics wondering whether the performance assessments are rigorous enough. All three versions of the assessments usually are scored by the institutions themselves, and students can retake them if they fail the first time.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University who helped design the edTPA, the national test, says the high pass rate on the PACT is expected. Teachers in California take up to three standardized tests, including a basic skills assessment and several subject matter tests, even before they take the PACT or one of the other two versions. She says each exam knocks out about 10 percent of the aspiring teacher pool in the state. In the 2009-10 academic year, 78 percent of candidates passed the state’s basic skills assessment, and 81 percent of applicants passed the reading instruction exam.

“This (pass rate) is only the people who’ve made it through all those gauntlets, that managed to get into the program and haven’t caved when they were asked to do the PACT,” Darling-Hammond said.

She added that the preparation programs that use the PACT, including the University of California system, Stanford and several schools within the CSU system, have the highest selectivity in admissions to their preparation programs.

“If this were statewide,” Darling-Hammond added, “the pass rate would certainly be much lower.”

A report from the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing cautioned against comparing the pass rates. Unlike the PACT, which is taken at the end of the preparation program, candidates take the four sections of the CalTPA at different times throughout their programs. Some programs counsel students out before they take the performance assessment, meaning only the top students may end up taking the exam.

Opponents of performance assessments say preparation programs and the state are missing the point by relying on an assessment to determine whether teachers are prepared for the classroom.

Ann Schulte, associate professor at CSU Chico, says preparation programs should be focused on working with and assessing teacher candidates in the field, so they receive frequent observations and feedback during their student teaching experiences from someone with extensive knowledge of their abilities and classrooms.

Schulte cited research that found alignment between the results of those who pass the PACT and the observations of educators supervising those candidates in the field.

“It begs the question, then, ‘Why are we doing it?’ ” she said.

Elsewhere in the country, some educators and students have asked the same question and subsequently refused to administer or take the national version of the assessment. In 2012, all but one student in the secondary-teacher training program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst refused to participate in the exam, arguing that mentors who observed them in a student teaching setting for months would be better judges of their teaching ability than Pearson, the education company administering the exams.

More concerning to some schools is the idea that pass rates on performance exams could be used to determine the quality of teacher preparation programs. Since 1998, the federal government has attempted to increase the accountability for preparation programs by requiring states to collect and report information about the programs, including completion rates, average scores on state and national teaching tests, and the number of student teaching hours required.

California includes pass rates from performance assessments in its own annual analysis of this data and uses that data as one of many measures that determine whether a school of education is “low-performing.”

In California, there is general consensus that the performance assessment, which encourages students to focus on how they would teach a variety of students, has at least created more thoughtful teachers, even if the research isn’t clear on whether the tests are improving the quality of the teaching force.

“It’s hard to imagine that the exercise isn’t raising their expertise level,” said Julie Gainsburg, associate professor at CSU Northridge. Gainsburg says the assessment is requiring students to reflect on their teaching and planning in ways that are more sophisticated than before the PACT.

“Does PACT make a better teacher? No,” said Nancy Prosenjak, a professor at CSU Northridge. “But I think we have a substantial program that’s research-based, we have the PACT,” she added. “So with all of those, maybe we have better teachers.”

Members from around the nation joined together at this year’s Annual Meeting to engage in conversations about edTPA, its impact, powerful potential, and usefulness as a tool to assess beginning teachers’ readiness to teach. Opening with a breakfast for members of the national Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium (TPAC), representatives from the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE), AACTE and Pearson updated members on edTPA’s current stage of development and implementation.

From Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim

ORLANDO, Fla. — When Evelyn Perry — an administrator within the School of Education and Urban Studies at Morgan State University — first learned about a relatively new teacher assessment tool known as edTPA, her first reaction was, “This is a lot of work.”