Can edTPA Be Gamed?

Over at EdWeek, Steven Sawchuk is asking the musical question, "Are New Teacher Tests Vulnerable to Cheating?" I look forward to other tough-to-answer EdWeek articles like "Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow?" and "Does the Pope avoid bears in the woods?"

The answer is, "Of course." edTPA (the "new teacher test" in question) is one more demonstration of the Law of Bad Assessment-- the more inauthentic the assessment and the more removed from what is actually being assessed, the easier it is to cheat.

edTPA does not assess an aspiring teacher's teaching skills. It assesses their skills in filling out the paperwork involved in edTPA. It assesses their ability to cough up a bunch of money to pay for the edTPA process. It assesses their ability to jump through the edTPA hoops in the exact manner preferred by the edTPA assessors.

All of these tasks are far removed from actually teaching a class. They are inauthentic measures of teaching skill, aptitude and knowledge, and they are all enormously gameable, and it was utterly and completely predictable, given the high stakes involved (will you get to be a teacher, or have you just wasted four years of your life and a buttload of money), that some business would emerge to help with that gaming.

Meet edTPA Tutoring. 

We can help you in any way you need to complete and pass your edTPA. We are a small company with dedicated tutors ready to work with you individually and confidentially to help you pass the edTPA. We have been in business for three years and we have a 100% success rate. 

The confidentiality part is particularly tasty. There's also a part about how "the Client will handle all video cutting as requested by the Consultant." In other words, these guys will help you edit your video for best effect.

The cost? $49.00 an hour, which is pretty manageable given how much is riding on your edTPA hoop-jumping festival.

Blogger and retired teacher Fred Klonsky has had many conversations and taken much flak for his comments about edTPA as it has sunk its fangs into Illinois, but he's been right all along.

edTPA is a crock and a swindle. I haven't studied it extensively; I don't need to because what I know is enough to indict it.

edTPA is the privatization of the profession. New teachers should be evaluated and certified by other teachers. Period. The system we have, where the gateway to the profession is guarded by state-level bureaucrats, is also a crock. But edTPA is worse, because on top of bureaucratic baloney, we have Pearson using the process to generate revenue, which means making sure they evaluate new teachers fairly and accurately is not their primary concern. The entry to the teaching profession should not be in the hands of a private corporation. I'm a reasonable man, but I can't imagine anything you can say that would convince me otherwise.

edTPA is ass-backwards. The correct way to evaluate teacher performance is to go watch the teacher work. As the supervisory body, it's your job to go find out how well the proto-teacher does the job. It is backwards to say that it's the proto-teacher's job to find a way to prove herself to you. It's an extension of what I say about assessing students. And that's because

edTPA is inauthentic assessment. Again-- there is only one way to find out if somebody can cut it as a teacher, and that is to go sit in their classroom and watch them work. Period. Seriously. I don't know why we even have to argue about this. If you want to hire a cakemaker for your wedding, you go taste their work. You don't have them fill out some complex forms and take pictures of the tools in their kitchen and mail the whole thing to somebody far away who isn't even going to be at the wedding.

edTPA is highly cheatable. The hallmark of inauthentic assessment is that it's easy to cheat, because you don't have to be good at what you're allegedly being judged for-- you just have to be good at the assessment task which, because it's inauthentic, consists of faking proxies for the real deal anyway. What it really measures is the proxy-faking skills.

There is one respect in which edTPA is an authentic task for our day and age in teaching. It confronts the proto-teacher with a basic ethical conundrum-- is it okay to cheat a bogus task in order to win the chance to do some actual teaching. As it turns out, this is a problem that most teachers in the age of Common Core and Big Standardized Tests face-- do we cheat our way around a bogus, pointless, anti-education obstacle in order to do some actual educating.

If someone is holding your career hostage, is it ethical to get past the hostage taker by any means possible?

Because, unfortunately, the Law of Bad Assessment has a corollary-- just as inauthentic assessment can be cheated by faking the required inauthentic tasks, it cannot be satisfied by the use of authentic skills. Being a really good proto-teacher with promise won't necessarily help you succeed with the edTPA process. Or to look at it another way-- not only is it easier to cheat to succeed, but it may be necessary to cheat. So what is cheating, exactly?

Congratulations, young proto-teacher, and welcome to the modern, ethically murky world of teaching.