Wednesday April 30th must have been a long, grueling day for Assemblymembers Deborah Glick and Catherine Nolan, subjected to nearly seven straight hours of hearing how panic inducing, demoralizing,
and intrusive the edTPA process has been for educators and their students
across the state. Other legislators from the Higher Education Committee and the
Education Committee of the State Assembly were present for much of the day,
including Steve Englebright, Patricia Fahy, Ellen Jaffee, Barbara Lifton, Chad
Lupinacci, Amy Paulin, Edward Ra, Daniel O’Donnell, and Shelley Mayer. The
controversies, difficulties, unintended consequences, concerns, and burdens of
edTPA went on and on, despite the presenters’ best efforts to avoid redundancy
and make last minute changes to their prepared remarks as they listened to their
colleagues’ presentations.
I am happy to report some good news: the democratic process
is alive and well, and there was no need for Powerpoint. It was good
old-fashioned questions and answers, and yes, even dialogue and discussion. At
the end, Deborah Glick promised there would be more to come and some next steps
announced in the coming days. The message came through loud and clear that the
so-called “safety net” compromise reached between the State Education
Department and Board of Regents April 29th was completely insufficient to
address all the concerns raised, and amounted to little more than a token white
flag of political surrender, albeit a welcome one.
The bad news is there is clearly an abyss, a disappointing
lack of communication between policy makers, legislators, and educators, and
clever corporate profiteers have figured out how to take advantage of this
Achilles’ heel. An end-of-day tweet from Deborah Glick pointed out the hearing
was “eye opening – corporate involvement in education isn’t going to be an
improvement.” When told by Professor Douglas Selwyn of Plattsburgh State
University what Linda Darling-Hammond said at AERA, Assemblywoman Catherine
Nolan lost her patience and said the most recent letter she had received from
Darling-Hammond was “wishy-washy and unintelligible” leading her to wonder if
she was for edTPA or not. Politics is about making decisions, she pointed out,
and it was clear the lawmakers are hungry for helpful information.
At times I felt I was witness to a reunion of sorts, when
people who haven’t seen each other in years but know each other well are eager
for news and catching up. “Tell me, what about this, and what happened to her,
and where is so-and-so now?” I was amazed at the legislators’ insightful
questions, and genuine interest in knowing what we thought. For example,
Catherine Nolan said she hears a common complaint from teachers that their
programs did not sufficiently prepare them for the realities of teaching, and
she wanted to know how we respond to that accusation. She then challenged the
teacher educators present in the room to speak up and show that there is no
crisis of “bad” teacher education programs and that we are doing a good job.
She was outraged to learn that a student wishing to contest a failing score on
the edTPA must pay a $200 fee to Pearson and called the policy “a disgrace.” She was thrilled to get a 1993 AERJ article by Wilson and Wineburg from Professor David Gerwin of Queens
College, and asked for additional feedback on how edTPA is intruding in
negative ways on the nationally recognized curriculum of teacher preparation
programs. Even when their eyes must have been glazing over after more than
five hours, and it was time to hear from some teacher candidates on their
experiences with the edTPA, the assembly members demonstrated caring concern in
understanding the students’ issues in detail, and how their confidence and
feelings of readiness to teach were affected by those experiences.
It’s hard to imagine how those hoping for a full time
teaching position in these times can hold up under the considerable demands and
pressures of the new requirements for licensure. Catherine Cornbleth, Professor
Emerita of the University of Buffalo, has described the changes being imposed
on teacher preparation as a “day one” mandate, that is, graduates of programs
should be prepared “to teach anyone, anywhere – on day one!” She worries that
“to expect expert teaching on day one is expecting way too much no matter how
well prepared, tested, and mentored the new teacher might be. I would not volunteer
to be the first root canal patient of the new, highly credentialed oral
surgeon. Would you?” (2014, p. 106). It’s curious how the medical analogy keeps
cropping up, and it leads me to think of scenes from Grey’s Anatomy where the
surgeons in training play out their personal dramas, mistakes, and foibles over
the open bodies of their patients. I think beginning teachers demonstrate far
greater humanity and professionalism, and in my experience at least, they enter
the journey to becoming a teacher with a burning desire to bring joy into the
lives of children in their charge. It pains me to see their noble ambitions
reduced to numbers on a test score, which, at the end of the day, is what they
get from edTPA, EAS, ALST, and the CST. That’s why I tell my student teachers
to go to graduation, and I go find them before the ceremony to take a group
picture of us in our caps and gowns. It may be old fashioned, but it’s easy to
put on a genuine smile for that photo.
