There has been much discussion about increased and new types of assessment at various levels of education—of K-12 students, of teachers and principals in K-12 education, and of prospective teachers in K-12 education.
Some of the discussion has focused on what has happened to the education K-12 students receive as a result of the increased emphasis on standardized testing, fueled by No Child Left Behind. Kenneth Bernstein, a retired teacher, wrote an article that appeared in Academe in February 2013, and was reposted by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, “A Warning to College Profs from a High School Teacher” in which he laid out the effects he sees that result from the heightened testing environment. In August 2013, Bernstein followed this up with another article, “Teacher Who Left: Why I am Returning to School“.
As Bernstein notes in his second article, the stakes have continued to rise with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the tests associated with these standards. Voices from students (e.g., Nikhil Goyal, “Why I Opted Out of APPR“) as well as principals (e.g., Carol Burris, “What Big Drop in New Standardized Test Scores Really Means“) have joined the conversation on the negative effects of this increased assessment on student learning.
Alongside this increased testing of student learning, are new systems of assessing teacher effectiveness. In New York State, assessment of teacher performance occurs through Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), which was adopted by the Board of Regents in 2000. Changes that were approved in 2010, require school districts to conduct an annual review of each teacher and principal resulting in a single composite effectiveness score and a rating of “highly effective”, “effective”, “developing”, or “ineffective”. This change to the APPR has not been without controversy, as evidenced in this story from October 4, 2013 of hundreds of teachers appealing their APPR.
The emphasis on increased testing has moved to the higher education arena as well, with the new requirement that all teachers seeking certification in New York State pass the edTPA (a teacher performance assessment developed at Stanford University). While the edTPA tasks assess things that teachers need to be able to do—plan for instruction, lead students in learning, and assess student learning—what has many teacher educators (e.g., teacher educators at the University of Massachusetts; Julie Gorlewski at SUNY New Paltz) and others concerned is having a prospective teacher’s performance over an entire teacher preparation program, including weeks of student teaching, come down to a snapshot of the teacher’s performance scored by a person hired by Pearson.
Commonalities among current assessment of K-12 student learning, K-12 teacher and principal performance, and prospective K-12 teacher performance are the high-stakes nature of the assessment, the use of snapshots of performance, and the critical assessment roles of persons other than the ones most familiar with the performance. Critics have already raised concerns about this increased assessment. What will be the cost to education? Kenneth Bernstein notes that we are already seeing some of the costs in the students who are now at the college level.