Brian Schultz

High-stakes, standardized teacher performance assessments (TPAs) are dramatically shifting the landscape of educator preparation. In this article, we examine illusions of objectivity and rigor embedded in edTPA, focusing on the reductive nature of standardized teacher assessments and the corrosive impact of the burgeoning TPA industry. We assert that TPAs corrupt the preparation process by discouraging authentic, multifaceted, longitudinal evaluations of candidate readiness, thereby undermining the very rigor and accountability they purport to ensure.

This commentary examines recent controversies surrounding edTPA, a high-stakes, standardized teacher performance assessment (TPA), focusing on the complex relationships among TPA policy, scholarship, and profit. We argue that TPA mandates have outpaced the research base, thus illustrating the influence of an intensely lucrative educational marketplace. We conclude this essay with a call for independent, peer-reviewed scholarship regarding the validity, reliability, and impact of high-stakes, privatized, teacher performance assessment.

This essay examines the impact of outsourcing teacher preparation and evaluation through high stakes teacher performance assessments like edTPA. In addition to undermining teacher preparation by marginalizing the local experts best situated to evaluate candidates’ performance, this has led to a growing industry of edTPA-related services. The authors use their own experiences with edTPA “coaching” and scoring to illustrate the inevitable consequences of shifting teacher preparation and evaluation to the private sector.

This chapter juxtaposes our analysis of dilemmas related to high-stakes Teacher Performance Assessments with excerpts from a recent electronic chat between the authors and a private edTPA “tutor” to illustrate the complexity of preparing candidates for teacher licensure in the midst of neoliberal educational policies. Written as a series of narrative interludes or interruptions—a parallel to how we see edTPA disrupting our work as teacher educators—this chapter offers a rhetorical representation of the absurdity that results from the corporatization of teacher evaluation. In so doing, we seek to highlight the ethical conundrums that outsider evaluation presents across the teacher preparation landscape, while simultaneously modeling critical responses to these disruptive educational policies.