NYC Public School Parents: How Pearson's revision of the EdTPA teacher certification process will create inequities for teachers being trained in districts with poor students by John Elfrank-Dana
In order for NY teachers to get certification to teach, they have to produce a performance portfolio, called an EdTPA (Education Teacher Performance Assessment) administered by Pearson, an for-profit corporation who his handing the administration of this exam across the country. They charge the student teachers $300 to process their EdTPA.
Since the closure of schools throughout the states, these teacher candidates cannot complete their EdTPA in the normal way, that is via teaching lessons in the classroom, videoing some of the lessons to submit along with extended responses to questions in the assessment. Now, Pearson has said that under these novel circumstances, that student teachers may submit evidence of teaching practice via social media of their schools’ platform that links students at home with their teacher, that show video recordings of teachers engaging students in online live and asynchronous activities from home that address the standards in the EdTPA rubrics.
This modification by Pearson presupposes these schools and districts, let alone the students, have access to high speed internet with relatively new laptops with web cams and their district a subscription to services like Google Classroom to provide the platform, which many do not. We have heard of the “digital divide”, the fact that many are not able to participate in the social media, Web 2.0, virtual world. That is still with us, as is evidenced by the need of NYC to hand out hundreds of thousands of devices (tablets and laptops) to students who do not have access. Add to that reports from some of my student teachers in NYC and Poughkeepsie that they are told by the mentor teachers in those districts that transitioning to online is not possible. Either the teachers were never trained on how to do online CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: How Pearson's revision of the EdTPA teacher certification process will create inequities for teachers being trained in districts with poor students by John Elfrank-Dana
