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.
