Pearson Rips Off Students with Tests Designed for Failure
New York State, in partnership with Pearson Education, is making it increasingly harder and more expensive to become a teacher without evidence that their demands and tests will improve education in the state. Last April Governor Cuomosmuggled a requirement into the state budget without discussion or input from professional educators arbitrarily mandating that students admitted to Schools of Education have a minimum 3.0 undergraduate grade point average and take a nationally normed test. No one demonstrated that a 3.1 GPA makes you a better teacher than someone with a 2.9 GPA or how the tests align with performance as a teacher.
In addition, New York State requires that certification candidates complete four other exams either created or administered by Pearson. Three are written exams and one involves a complex portfolio submission. New York State has already been cited twice by a federal court for racial bias in its teacher certification requirements because of the "unlawful disparate impact" of its teacher certification exams.
The portfolio part of the teacher certification requirement is known as the edTPA. edTPA was created at Stanford University by a sub-division called SCALE and is administered and graded by Pearson. Essentially SCALE, Pearson, and New York State decided to replace student teacher evaluations by university field supervisors and cooperating teachers with an electronic portfolio, supposedly to ensure higher standards. The SCALE/Pearson edTPA electronic portfolio includes lesson planning, a discussion of student teaching placement sites, videos of candidates interacting with K-12 students, their personal assessment of the lesson, and documentation of student learning. While each piece by itself makes sense, the package, which focuses on just three lessons and can be sixty pages long, takes so much time to complete that it detracts from the ability of student teachers to learn Pearson Rips Off Students with Tests Designed for Failure: