Performance Assessment for California Teachers;
Background:
SB 2042, passed by the California Legislature in in 2000, required a major revision of teacher preparation in California based upon a new set of state standards and a set of teacher performance expectations (TPEs) . The universities have responded by revising their programs. In 2042 The legislature created a system where the state must continually train new teachers to replace those driven out by inadequate working conditions. One element of 2042 required the development of high stakes performance assessment of California teachers (TPA) based upon the teacher performance expectations (TPE) to be developed by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. As of 2009, three options have been approved; 1) TPA, 2) Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), 3) Fresno Assessment for Student Teachers. The following is an analysis of PACT.
PACT: See the excellent article on PACT in Rethinking Schools.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/24_04/24_04_exams.shtml
PACT is used as an exit requirement in the Teacher Preparation Program at Sacramento State. In my experience it takes important time ( at least 1/3) away from actual student teaching. That is the student teacher is performing for PACT rather than preparing, teaching, and motivating children.
We have sought to have this changed but received no assistance from our legislators. There are faculty with an opposing viewpoint. They see PACT as good.
It has now become increasingly normalized. That is current students do not often recognize that this is an imposition that detracts from teaching and learning.
Assessing PACT,
A state-mandated Teacher Performance Assessment for teacher credentialing
By Ann Berlak
The United States is in crisis. The economy is in shambles, the degree of economic inequality is greater than at any time since the years preceding the Great Depression, and it is unclear to what extent the destruction of the environment can be undone. Over the past decade politicians have promulgated a regime of high-stakes centralized standardized testing of K-12 students for the purpose of holding schools accountable for doing their part to address the social, political, and economic problems we face. It is, however, now clear to most of us-- teachers, teacher educators, citizens and policy makers --that standardized testing is itself part of the problem, and certainly not a solution. Like the economic policies of the past eight years, K-12 standardized testing is now widely recognized as a failed policy.
It is therefore stunning that state and national politicians and policy makers are presently mandating an additional system of high stakes testing in further pursuit of the improvement of K-12 schools. They are requiring teaching credential programs to administer standardized high stakes tests to credential candidates. They seem to believe that this will produce a greater number of “highly effective” teachers, and do so cost effectively.1 At a time when the budgets of virtually every social program across the country are being cut to the bone, and the Governor of California is asking public universities for still more budget cuts, politicians and policy makers are imposing upon teacher education programs a new, expensive and time-consuming assessment system of no proven value. And no one seems to know where the money to pay for it will come from.
In California each credential program has the choice between participating in the state-sponsored assessment system designed in consultation with Educational Testing Service, CalTPA, and the Performance Assessment of California Teachers or PACT,2 the assessment system that affects teacher credentialing programs, the preparation of credential candidates, and, ultimately, K-12 schools. An assessment of PACT is vital not only to Californians, but to teacher educators and citizens across the country, since Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, presently one of the most prominent teacher educators in the U.S., and the lead researcher in the development of PACT, is putting PACT forward as a national model for teacher assessment.
What PACT is and what it claims to do
In 1998 the California Legislature mandated that credentialing programs institute a Teacher Performance Assessment that uses state-approved rating scales aligned with and derived from the California academic content standards and Teacher Performance Expectations (TPE’s) that were already well established criteria for teacher certification in the state. Since then credentialing institutions have been overhauling their programs to bring them into compliance with the mandate.3 The result has been an unprecedented degree of state control over public education and a substantial transformation of credentialing programs in California.4
PACT was initiated by a consortium of schools of education at all the Universities of California (or UCs), Mills College and Stanford University, joined early on by three California State Universities or CSUs. (The UCs are not to be confused with CSUs which are of lower status, have fewer resources, heavier workloads, and lower salaries.) The intent of the consortium was to create an alternative to the system constructed by the state and ETS. There have been two major published studies assessing the effects and value of PACT, a 2006 study by Raymond Pecheone, PACT’s project director, and Ruth Chung, a member of the project’s research and program staffs, the other by Chung, published in 2008. These studies, conducted by PACT insiders, and funded by the University of California Office of the President and the Hewlett and Morgan Family Foundations, purport to document the validity, reliability, promise and usefulness of PACT.
Its advocates believe that using PACT will improve teacher quality through its gate-keeping function, by directly improving the teaching of credential candidates, and by providing answers to many questions that have long plagued educational research: how to make comparisons of effectiveness among candidates, establish the relative effectiveness of different teacher credential programs, refine programs, and improve the preparation of beginning teachers. 7 PACT Advocates intend for it to eventually provide the missing link in the chain of evidence between classroom performance of credential candidates during their student teaching (as measured by PACT) and the achievement of the pupils they teach during their first year, as measured by standardized tests that remain the gold standard of school learning. 8
Though many teacher educators who have participated in piloting PACT privately question PACT’s value and catalogue its limitations, only a few discuss their concerns openly, and virtually nothing has been published that offers a systematic critique of Pecheone and Chung’s defense of PACT. One reason for this reticence is made clear by an e-mail forwarded last Aug. 1 from a high-ranking official of the California State University to many CSU teacher educators. The gist of the letter is that though the CSU expected the state to recognize the importance of appropriate funding to support the state-mandated Teacher Performance Assessments no funding will be forthcoming; nevertheless the law has gone into effect and campuses must comply. The message was clear: any student who completes a program at an institution not using PACT or another TPA will not be granted his or her credential.
Funding for teacher education, as for all public programs designed to serve the general welfare, continues its downward spiral, resulting in a student body that is increasingly and disproportionately white, and in larger class sizes, higher ratios of student teachers to supervisors, decreased numbers of supervisor visits per credential candidate, the elimination of course offerings, hikes in tuition and fees, and even proposals to close down entire teacher education programs. Though reduced funding is diminishing teacher education programs, the impetus to implement the TPA continues unabated, at a scoring cost of approximately $400 per candidate. There are a number of additional and significant costs including faculty training time and full and part time administrative cost as well. 9 The authors of the legislation likely had no idea of the consequences of mandating the TPA without funding it: the TPA legislation snuck in under the radar as part of an omnibus education bill and the issue of funding was not debated nor even raised10.
There seem to be three possibilities for funding PACT: drawing upon existing instructional resources at the expense of other identifiable and/or unidentifiable elements of programs (Chico State’s Department of Education has been allocated $100,000 for implementing PACT in 2009 and no one seems to know what part of the University budget the money is coming from); requiring faculty to do assessments as an overload, without compensation, and in contradiction of the Union contract (as also seems to be the case at Chico State); and asking credential candidates to pay the cost of administering the tests themselves, adding an additional fee to their already skyrocketing tuition and burden of educational debt. As is the case with K-12 schools, the assumption seems to be that teacher education can do ever more with even less.
Though many teacher educators comply with PACT because they see no alternative, others do so because they genuinely believe PACT is on balance good and useful.
Is PACT good science?
PACT is touted as an evidence-based, valid and reliable assessment instrument for enforcing professional standards and assessing teacher effectiveness. First, let’s consider its validity. An assessment instrument is valid to the extent that it accurately and fairly assesses the concept, idea, performance activity or belief it claims to assess. In the case of PACT this means that the mean of the scores assigned to a candidate by a trained rater represents the degree of the candidate’s future effectiveness as a teacher.
In order to decide if this number accurately or validly represents (and predicts) effective teaching we first need a common idea of what effective teaching is. According to Linda Darling-Hammond such agreement is not problematic. She writes, “(T)he question (of what teachers ought to know and be able to do to be considered effective) is easier to address than it once was because… (there are) now performance-based standards developed during the past decade… for beginning teacher licensing that have been adapted or adopted in more than thirty states and reflect a consensual, research- grounded view of what teachers know and should be able to do.” 17
The claim that there is a consensual view of effective teaching raises some thorny issues. First, defining quality always involves value judgments. Conceptions of effective teachers are inseparable from and as highly politicized as conceptions of the good society. It seems obvious to me that disagreements about the qualities of a good teacher like disagreements over what makes a good society, do and should abound. Thus, assessing effective teaching is not, as Darling-Hammond claims, an objective, “research-grounded” empirical process.
I will give only two of many possible examples of bias in the PACT definition of good teaching. One is suggested by Pecheone and Chung’s musings about why candidates teaching in “suburban schools” get higher PACT scores than those in “urban” or “inner-city” schools. Pecheone and Chung’s hypothesis is that the differences in scores can be attributed to credential candidates in urban settings experiencing more constraints on their teaching decisions related to district-mandated curricula.18 Pecheone and Chung do not entertain an alternative possibility—that the source of these difference in scores might be that the PACT conception of the effective teacher is a generic one that excludes qualities of effective teaching that may be specific to teachers of non-dominant (non- “suburban”, non- “inner city”) racial and linguistic groups and social classes. The PACT conception of an effective teacher may be weighted towards a conception of an effective suburban teacher.
Consider also how the requirement that credential candidates demonstrate their evaluation skills by evaluating student learning during the one-week period of the TE affects the concept of effective teaching. Evaluating candidates’ assessment skills within this time frame in effect requires candidates to assess relatively simple skills such as spelling or adding fractions that can be taught and assessed within a week. However, in the time frame provided by the TE it is not possible to ascertain how well the candidate assesses more complex and long term goals, such as the development of mutual respect between Asian and Latino students, or the growth of student’s sense of agency. Though such learning may be highly valued in some conceptions of effective teaching, it cannot be recognized within the PACT. Note also that empathy, enthusiasm, fairness, respect, commitment, and other so-called dispositions have no place in PACT’s conception of the effective teacher. 19
Social justice teaching and PACT
That anyone would contest the idea of effective teaching implicit in the PACT rubrics may initially seem puzzling, particularly to people who have a liberal-mainstream view of effective teaching. This is because the PACT conception accords with their common sense. Who would for example quarrel with the State’s requirement that credential candidates be able t:
“List the content standards that are the target of student learning (list the complete text of the relevant parts of each standard): (TPE 1)”
as part of their documentation of the Teaching Event. However, implicit in the State Content Standards is a particular viewpoint that not everyone endorses about what is most important for children to learn. For example, it is of great concern to some that there is no mention of racism, poverty, sexism, or income inequalities in the state content standards, nor any alternative to the view that US foreign policy might be motivated by reasons other than humanitarianism. 20 TPE 1 in effect defines good teaching as teaching uncritically what the state mandates.
PACT is particularly troubling to those who believe that central purposes of schooling should include promoting a vigorous, more egalitarian and sane democracy and preparing children to lead rich and generous lives, not preparation for jobs that are for the most part dull, boring, meaningless and poorly paid, nor improving the competitiveness of US workers in the global economy.21 Educators who want schools to promote social justice consider it essential that teachers look critically at the standards they are expected to promote. 22
Credential programs committed to social justice can always add to the TPEs. as the Department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at California State University Sacramento did. Finding the state-mandated Teacher Performance Expectations that underlie PACT too limited, the faculty voted to add the following to the State’s 13 TPEs:
TPE 14. Candidate exhibits a commitment to democratic practices, intercultural communication, and civic participation, including rejection of all forms of discrimination based upon race, ethnicity, social class, gender, gender identity, age, ability, sexual orientation, and political beliefs, among others.
TPE 15. Candidate develops an educational environment that fosters personal and professional integrity, civility, respect and support for students from diverse cultural and ethnic groups.
Most if not all of those who constructed PACT are, I am sure, very well-intentioned, and would likely would not oppose these additions. However, a single standard or definition of effective teaching promulgated state- and nation-wide is likely to exclude the interests of those on the margins and to marginalize the cultivation of creativity in both teachers and their students. Perhaps this can be illuminated by imagining what criteria for assessing teacher effectiveness would be central to an alliance of teachers and poor parents who are primarily concerned with their impotence within the political order and/or whose primary and overriding goal is to reduce race and class inequalities in schools.
Is PACT a valid assessment of performance?
PACT claims that it assesses teachers’ actual teaching performance in “real world” contexts, rather than teachers’ knowledge about or dispositions towards teaching. It’s not quite so simple as that. Judgments about the quality of a piece of art-work or a player’s performance in a particular foot-ball game are examples of assessments where no inferences are necessarily made about underlying traits or skills that the products or observed behavior represent. (“It’s a wonderful painting,” not necessarily, “she’s a talented artist.”) In contrast, we are expected to make inferences from the TE about candidates’ ongoing qualities or competencies such as generalized planning or assessing skills.23
There are a number of reasons to question the validity of making inferences about candidates’ skills by observing a fifteen-minute video-tape of the TE, and then rating it according to the PACT protocol. I will suggest just a few. First, the fifteen- minute video-taped Teaching Event is highly contrived. Since the children who are videoed must have received written permission from their parents, they know this is not a “normal” lesson. The children may have been prompted to be on their best behavior or promised rewards for behaving well; the video may be shot when the children most difficult to manage are out of the room. In at least one case normal seating arrangements were changed to make sure students who had not been given permission were at the periphery. In addition some credential candidates may be highly anxious about being video-taped, particularly if they know the tape will be assessed by a stranger, to whose questions and concerns they will be unable to respond. It would not be surprising if credential candidates chose simple relatively foolproof lessons for their teaching event. If so the assessment would say little about the capacity of the candidates to teach arguably more important complex concepts and ideas.
Though Pecheone and Chung claim that PACT encourages and captures a unified and integrated learning sequence, it is expected that “(T)he focus of the PACT assessments (be).. on candidates’ application of subject-specific pedagogical knowledge that research finds to be associated with successful teaching.”24 I think what this means is that each lesson must apply theory to practice. It is no news that practitioners do not normally alter their practice on the basis of research findings, and that there has long been a vigorous debate about the relation of theory to teaching practice. This requirement to teach a lesson that is “research based” likely has the effect of diverting the candidate from an intuitive and creative performance, and suggests a shocking lack of attention to the last twenty years of utilization research—research on the viability of “applying theory to practice”—that indicates that top-down, research and development models of the 1950’s and 1960’s didn’t work. 25
Assessing PACT claims about its effects on learning to teach
Pecheone and Chung and Darling-Hammond promise many positive outcomes from using PACT, among them much stronger skills for a wider range of credential candidates 31 To date, however, their research seems to focus on candidates’ self-reports and subjective perceptions that they both liked the performance assessments and found them useful. 32 The two PACT studies suggest there were a significant number of credential candidates who viewed PACT as an interruption of rather than an asset to their learning. This seems to be true of many students in our program as well.
When evaluating the significance of such self reports it is important to know student’s points of comparison to the PACT-driven programs. Perhaps the students might have preferred the credential program offered prior to the introduction of PACT, of which they had no knowledge. An analogy would be to automobile workers who worked in teams to build entire automobiles, until the option to work in teams disappeared with the introduction of the assembly line. It took just two generations for workers to lose memory of the experience of building an automobile together, and to come to accept the assembly line as “the way it is.” Like the assembly line workers, prospective teachers may be content with PACT because they have had no opportunity to experience or envision an alternative.
Darling-Hammond claims that PACT will reduce the achievement gap by “replacing the decentralized non-system of U.S. education with a more systematic professional policy.” 33 This is not the place to rehearse the many and diverse explanations of the so-called achievement gap. The alternative ways of conceptualizing the vastly unequal outcomes of schooling—“the education debt,” 34“the opportunity gap,” for example—suggest that our understanding of the origins of the gap and the related notions of how to address it range widely. I see no reason to believe that this long-standing problem will be addressed by a centralized professional program that has PACT rubrics at its center.
Hierarchy and power
The introduction of Teacher Performance Assessments in California signified a definitive transfer of power over teacher education from university-based teacher education to the state and federal governments and their agents. Credential programs were told that each institution could construct its own Teacher Performance Assessment, though the TPA had, of course, to be approved by the State. On the face of it the opportunity for each credential program to write its own TPA appears egalitarian. However, the results were exceedingly hierarchical. Only the foundation-supported and well-connected UCs had the resources to construct and implement an alternative. CSU Dominguez Hills wrote an alternative in pursuit of “an elegant and rich assessment system” but after three years decided to join PACT “in order to ameliorate the costs associated with an independently designed system” 35
My hunch is that the writers and creators of PACT and their students engaged in discussions and debates surrounding PACT’s construction and that these experiences contributed to some of the positive effects they claim for PACT. However, the experience of the creators of any system is bound to be quite different from the experience of the system-users who, in this case, found themselves at the bottom of the pecking order, implementing a pre-fabricated, already “packaged” assessment system. Though it is claimed that the new reforms are now owned and sustained by the profession,38 this is only true if one defines “the profession” very narrowly, excluding the many teacher educators and credential candidates who have had no input or buy-in into PACT. There is no better way to destroy morale and to promote mindless implementation than to impose conformity and obedience to dictates from above.
PACT was the creation of a well-funded elite and its deputies from the beginning. It depended heavily upon the financial support of the Carnegie Foundation and the Office of the President of Stanford. Pecheone and Chung make the role of funding sources quite clear: “The cost of developing PACT could not have been accomplished without… financial support from the university of California office of the President and corporate funded foundations.” 39 The important task of creating the rubrics that define and proclaim the qualities of highly qualified teachers was given to selected faculty and doctoral students, primarily from the high status UCs and private universities, and their appointees who held like-minded views of scientific research and of the qualities of highly effective teachers with foundation-funders.
The assumption that PACT’s authors have a particular entitlement to assess teacher education programs is evident in Darling-Hammond’s statement that our group (the creators and developers of PACT) “can play a special role in developing leaders who have sophisticated knowledge of teaching and are prepared not only to practice effectively in the classroom but also to take into account the bigger picture of schools and schooling.”40
The testing frenzy, including PACT and other forms of TPA, is a diversion from confronting the realities of inequality and schooling. This frenzy has been likened to a political spectacle: “Pure theater with no other purpose than to look like something positive is happening, whereas it is not.”41Although the call is to ensure highly qualified teacher, there is no evidence to suggest that credentialed teachers as a group are not highly qualified, 42and there certainly are other more productive roads to improving schools than TPAs—paying teachers more, providing better facilities, lowering class size, and insuring that highly qualified teachers end up teaching in predominantly poor, Latino, and Black schools. The massive campaign to hold teacher educators accountable is in part a way to name, analyze, and normalize the disproportionate educational failures of poor and Black and Brown children in a “scientific” enough way, ultimately, to gain assent, and minimize resistance, to privatization. If the intent of the TPA were really to improve teaching and schooling then at the very least provision would have been made to provide feedback from the TE assessment to credential candidates that would help them improve their teaching. However, there is no meaningful provision for such feedback. The story of PACT is just a permutation of an old story, nothing new.
Conclusion: What is to be Done?
Larry Cuban of Stanford University “characterized the momentum building in the late 1980s for national tests and curriculum as a train rushing down a track. He asked whether scholars should accommodate to what appeared by then to be almost a political reality—by helping to build a better track for the train… or whether… to use their expertise to try publicly to slow down the train by speaking out to lay and professional audiences. ” 43 As Marilyn Cochran-Smith writes, the train Cuban described is now streaking through a deep dark tunnel that instead of light at its end may well have a concrete wall.44 PACT may be seen as a well-intentioned but ultimately flawed attempt to build a better track.
To use another analogy, the teacher performance assessments are a house of cards. Each of us could suggest policies that would be more likely to improve the schools, narrow the opportunity gap, and address issues of inequality more productively than teacher performance assessments. There are at least two reasons teacher educators are simply going along with the mandates. One is the deep hold that PACT and similarly flawed assessment policies have upon many teacher educators’ minds. As a nation and a profession we have come to accept unquestioningly a view of science that ultimately maintains hierarchies of power. As a beginning we need to re-think our conceptions of assessment and science.
The second reason teacher educators are not resisting the TPA is that fear of challenging authority is deeply embedded in most of us, who have become accustomed to being at the bottom of the academic heap. Challenging state mandated TPA will require a major change in the degree of respect accorded to teacher educators. This will only follow a major change in how teacher educators view ourselves. Included in the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act is the mandate that the Department of Education must toughen standards for teacher education programs. In the same document is another mandate: that the federal government is barred from issuing regulations governing higher education by measuring (non-teacher credential) student learning outcomes. This is the clearest expression I have seen of the low status and regard accorded teacher educators.
I see speaking out as an obligation for all who intend to prepare teachers to promote a just and democratic society. How can we as teachers and scholars speak out against policies if we believe they are seriously flawed in logic and evidence? The Teacher Education Caucus of the California Faculty Association (CFA) has been organizing opposition to the TPA. The CFA is filing a system wide work-load grievance to address the increased workloads that result from the unfunded TPA mandate. At several campuses Statutory Grievances have been filed challenging PACT in terms of its assault on academic freedom. So far we have received only limited support. Nothing will happen unless more teacher educators join in. At the very least we need to act as role models for succeeding generations of teachers.
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Resources
Berlak, Ann (2003) Who’s in charge here? Teacher education and 2042. In Teacher Education Quarterly, Vol 30, No.1 Winter 31-41
Berlak, Harold (2000) Cultural politics, the science of assessment and democratic renewal of public education. In Ann Filer (ed.)Assessment: social practice and social product. London: Falmer press.
Berlak, Harold et. al. (1992) Towards a new science of educational testing and assessment. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press
Bracey, Gerald (2003) Schools should not prepare students for the world of work. In Bracy, On the Death of Childhood.Portsmouth: Heinemann, 30-44.
Berliner, David & and Bruce Biddle (1995) The manufactured crisis. New Yorrk: HarrperCollins
Berliner, David (2005) The near impossibility of testing for teacher quality. Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 56, No. 3, May/June 205-213
Chung, Ruth (2008) Beyond Assessment: Performance Assessments. Teacher Education. Teacher Education Quarterly, winter, 7-28
Cochran-Smith (2006) Evidence, efficacy and effectiveness: Introduction to the double issue. Journal of Teacher Education Volume 57, # 1, January/February. 3-5
Cochran-Smith, Marilyn (2005a). Studying teacher education. What we know and need to know. Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 57, No.4, September/October 301-306
Cochran-Smith, Marilyn (2005b) 2005 Presidential address: The new teacher education for better or for worse. Educational Researcher, Vol. 34, No. 7 October. 3-18
Cochran-Smith, Marilyn (2005c) Teacher education and the outcomes trap. Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 56, No. 5. November/December. 411-417.
Darling-Hammond, Linda (2006) Assessing teacher education: The usefulness of multiple measures for assessing program outcomes. Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 57, No. 2 March/April. 120-138
Darling-Hammond, Linda (1994) National standards and assessment. American Journal of Education. 478-510
Delandshere, Ginette & Anthony Petrosky (1998) Assessment of complex performances: Limitations of key measurement Assumptions. Educational Researcher, Vol. 26, No. 2, 14-24
Eisner, Elliot W. (1999) The uses and limits of performance assessment Phi Delta Kappan. May. 658-60
Keller, Evelyn Fox, (1985) Reflections on gender and science. New Haven: Yale University Press
Kohn, Alfie (2006) The trouble with rubrics. English Journal, Vol. 95, No. 4. March, 12-14
Lather, Patti (2003) This IS your father’s paradigm: Government intrusion and the case of qualitative research in education. Guba Lecture, American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April
Lather, Patti (2005) Foulcauldian scientificity: Rethinking the research, policy and practice nexus. American Educational Studies Association, Nov. 2005
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (2006) From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schoolsEducational Researcher Vol. 35, No.7. October. 2-13
Mabry, Linda (1999) Writing to the rubric. Phi Delta Kappan. Vol. 80.9, 673-79
Messick, Samuel (1994) The interplay of evidence and consequences in the validation of performance assessments. Educational Researcher. Vol. 23, #2, March. 13-23
Nelson, Thomas. (2003) Editor’s introduction: In response to increasing state and national control over the teacher education profession. Teacher Education Quarterly. Vol. 30, No. 1, Winter . 19-31
Pecheone, Raymond l. & Ruth R. Chung, (2006) Evidence in teacher education. The performance assessment for California Teachers (PACT). Journal of Teacher Education. Vol. 57, No. 1 January/February , 22-36
Russell, Sharon (2006) Reforming urban teacher education: SB 2042 implementation five years later. Issues in Teacher Education,Vol.15, #1, Spring. 27-51
Sandy, Mary (2006). Timing is everything: Building state policy on teacher credentialing in an era of multiple, competing and rapid educational reforms. Issues in Teacher Education, Vol 15, No.1, Spring. 7-19
St. Clair, Ralf (2005) Similarities and superunknowns: An essay on the challenges of educational research. In Harvard Educational research Vol. 75, Number four. Winter 435-454
Sleeter, Christine (2003) Reform and control: An analysis of SB 2042. Teacher Education Quarterly. Vol. 30, NO. 1, Winter . 19-31
Sylvester, Paula M., Deborah Summers, & Edward F. Williams (2006), Costs and benefits of accountability: A case study of Credential Candidates’ performance assessments. Issues in Teacher Education, Vol. 15, #1, Spring. 21-35.
Villegas, Ana Maria (2007) Dispositions in Teacher Education. Journal of teacher education, Vol. 58, No.5, Novembr/December 370-380.
Wineberg, Mona S., Evidence in Teacher preparation. Establishing a framework for accountability. Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 57 No. 1, January/February 51-64
Wolf, Dennie & Nancy Pistone (1991). Taking full measure: rethinking assessment through the arts. New York: College entrance examination board.
1 See Darling-Hammond, 2006
2. See Nelson, 2003, Berlak, A., 2003, Sandy, 2006
3 This is in addition to existing requirements including passing the CSET, a state-administered test of general knowledge, maintaining a B or better GPA in their credential courses, completing student teaching successfully, and passing the state required RICA--a test of knowledge about teaching reading. Credential candidates must pay for taking (and re-taking if necessary) each of these tests. See Russell, 2006, A. Berlak, 2003, Sandy, 2006, Chung, 2008 for Teacher Performance Assessment history in California.
4 Sandy, 2006, 700
7 Pecheone and Chung,2006, 24
8 Pecheone and Chung, 2006, 32. Pecheone and Chung do not specify how the “achievement gains” (33) will be assessed. However, there is no conceivable alternative in a study of this complexity to the used of standardized test scores.
9 The greatest cost of PACT is paying for the assessments. However, at our university money was also spent to fund a full time position to organize the TPA, and additional space to store portfolios was required. The time required for curriculum revision increased workload without reimbursement.
10 SB2042, passed in 1998 which established teacher performance assessments stated explicitly that the implementation of teacher performance assessment is subject to the availability of funds. SB 1209 (2006) which mandated the TPA was unfunded.
17 Darling-Hammond, 2006b, 123
18 Pecheone and Chung, 2006, 29
19 See Villegas , 2007, for a persuasive argument regarding the assessment of dispositions.
20 . See Sleeter ,2003. for an excellent critique of the state content standards.
21 See Bracey, 2004
22.. Cochran-Smith, 2003,11,13; Cochran -Smith,2005c, 415; Eisner, 1999. Sleeter, 2003,8
23. Messick, 1994, 14,16
24 Pecheone & Chung, 2006, 23.
25 Lather, 2002, 2