Assignment for "Assessment" class, NYTimes article review

Review of New York Times article:

“Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest” (6 May 2012)

“On Education” blog entry by Michael Winerip

This article describes the refusal of 67 out of 68 preservice teachers at the University of Massachusetts School of Education to submit their Teacher Performance Assessment videos and detailed lesson plans to Pearson, the textbook publishing company administering the Stanford University-designed teacher evaluation program. The education students say that their professors, who, like our own College of Education supervisors, observe them in actual teaching situations, “can do a better job judging their skills than a corporation that has never seen them.”

The article is, to a certain extent, an expression of opinion. In the very first sentence, author Michael Winerip calls the TPA an aspect of the “corporatization of public education in America.” He goes on to characterize the UMass protest against the TPA as “quaint and ridiculous.” However, the article also involves factual reporting. Winerip interviews the protesting preservice teachers and their professors, as well as representatives of the TPA, for his piece.

This is the only NY Times piece to have appeared on TPA, so I do not know what, if anything, has come of the UMass protest. Much of the article is devoted to concerns about the parents’ permission of students who appear in the TPA videos to be videotaped. This issue seems to have been resolved at our university thanks to instructions that we either follow our mentor teachers’ school policy in this regard or use CoE-developed permission slips. But I learned a great deal about the “back story” of the TPA program by reading Winerip’s article.

For instance, I found out that Pearson’s bid to administer the Stanford program was the winner in a field of six because the company was the only one to provide seed money for field testing. It had nothing to do with the quality of Pearson’s teacher education offerings, which in my own experience has been middling at best and occasionally outright dubious. Pearson will charge $300 from future preservice teachers in the “more than two dozen states” that have committed to adopting the TPA, but will pay evaluators only $75 per teaching assessment. One of the protesting students at UMass, interviewed by Winerip, wonders whether this is sufficient compensation.

Personally, I don’t wonder about that at all. I know for a fact that it isn’t.

I am a former journalist who is beginning a new career as an English teacher. I used to be paid $75 per “news brief,” and I remember exactly how much time I put into writing those articles. It was rarely more than 45 minutes, and usually about half an hour. That wouldn’t even begin to cover the amount of material the TPA student participants are being asked to produce (20 minutes of videotape alone, plus pages and pages of lesson plans, reflections, student work and reactions to it). 

And as far as I know, the Pearson evaluators do not even have the accountability measure that I had: multiple layers of editors proofing my work. Because they are being paid per grade, and not being compensated for their time, there is no incentive for these evaluators even to watch the full amount of video submitted by students, much less to pore over the rest of the documentation.

My experience working for The Hollywood Reporter, a trade paper for media industry professionals, also tells me that Pearson will be making about a 200% profit on every TPA test. After paying the evaluator, who is a freelancer and therefore gets neither job security nor benefits of any kind, Pearson’s only costs will likely be maintenance of their website and online support services. These factors cannot cost more than $25 per student, and since there will probably be tens of thousands of “customers” every year it may come to considerably less.

Many of my suspicions about the TPA, which were aroused when I learned during our student teaching orientation that the program would be administered by Pearson, were confirmed by this article. I too believe that public education is in the course of being privatized, or in Winerip’s word, “corporatized.” In fact, I believe that the widespread “denigration of public schoolteachers,” as Winerip puts it at the end of his piece, is part of an overall strategy to turn true public education – schooling in individual neighborhoods that prepares students to be responsible, capable adults who contribute to society and the economy – into the political equivalent of Welfare. 

In many major metropolitan areas, young people from low-income and/or high-crime areas already constitute the vast majority of public school students. By instituting policies that punish “ineffective schools and teachers” without mentioning the fact that one is actually punishing these students and the neighborhoods in which they live – students and neighborhoods that already bear the brunt of burdens like the general availability of guns and severely addictive drugs – the “education reformers” are dismantling America’s public education infrastructure in order to build a system in which private companies like Pearson can take an ever-growing slice of the huge public education pie.

Pearson’s move to invest in the TPA program could be one example of this. In the name of providing a “more objective” assessment process for education majors (one which, incidentally, indicates a lack of respect for education professors’ evaluation abilities as opposed to those of other university-level academics), this private corporation is gobbling up the market for preservice teacher testing in at least half the country. The next step will be to apply the TPA (and I find it significant that it is not called STPA, or Student Teacher Performance Assessment) to all of America’s three million teachers. By making its initial investment in the field-testing phase of the TPA, Pearson may very well have solidified its position as the future Microsoft of teacher evaluation.