Teacher Performance Assessment Under Scrutiny
A column from The New York Times takes aim at the Teacher Performance Assessment, a performance-based licensing test that about 200 teacher preparation programs across 25 states are now piloting. In essence, the story says that a number of students and faculty at the University of Massachusetts are refusing to participate because they don't like that Pearson, the New York City-based educational publishing and testing company, is in charge of arranging the scoring process, rather than teachers and faculty members.
Pearson has been caught up in "Pineapplegate"—a wave of criticism over an apparently bungled New York-based reading-test question. But that issue doesn't even show up in the column, which instead seems to play into general fears about the "corporatization" of public education. The last line of the column reads: "There is a whole education industry that is flourishing because it is built on the denigration of public schoolteachers," its author writes.
The irony of all this is that the exam has been developed by Stanford University researchers and teacher
Pearson has been caught up in "Pineapplegate"—a wave of criticism over an apparently bungled New York-based reading-test question. But that issue doesn't even show up in the column, which instead seems to play into general fears about the "corporatization" of public education. The last line of the column reads: "There is a whole education industry that is flourishing because it is built on the denigration of public schoolteachers," its author writes.
The irony of all this is that the exam has been developed by Stanford University researchers and teacher
