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For years, California has been faced with a shortage of teachers that predated the pandemic but which the pandemic certainly did not help. A key factor that exacerbates this shortage are the high-stakes teaching performance assessments (TPAs) used in the state, such as the California Teaching Performance Assessment (CalTPA), the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), and the Reading Instruction Competency Assessment (RICA).
These act as overly restrictive barriers preventing us from solving not just the teacher shortage but also our significant teacher diversity problem. This is why the introduction of Senate Bill 1263 last year was a sign of hope and a step in the right direction.
The original version of SB 1263, in essence, sought to dismantle the use of TPAs in the state of California and was strongly supported by those of us at the California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education (CARE-ED), and the California Teachers Association (CTA).
But since its introduction, the bill has been modified to keep TPAs intact and instead implement a review panel to oversee the TPA and make recommendations about it to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), the agency tasked with overseeing the TPA.
We in CARE-ED and the CTA found this development to be deeply disappointing. While there are naturally differing viewpoints about the TPAs, with voices calling for keeping the assessments intact, it is education researchers and actual teachers on the front line who grapple with the realities of classroom pedagogy on a daily basis and are best positioned to know if TPAs are serving their stated purpose of ensuring qualified teachers or are actually undermining this very goal.
In theory, TPAs are designed to measure and assess the educational knowledge, skills and readiness of teachers and predict their effectiveness in the classroom. In addition to being a measurement tool, they are also framed as being a learning experience in themselves by providing student teachers with feedback regarding their performance.
In practice, however, TPAs are a severe source of stress and strain on student teachers, many of whom come from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds and are already overburdened in various ways.
In 2019, I was part of a team of researchers at CARE-ED that examined the pass rates of the edTPA, CalTPA, and RICA according to different demographic groups. What we found were consistent racial disparities across all three assessments. In effect, the TPAs are functioning as racialized gatekeepers systematically impeding candidates of color — especially Black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian candidates — from attaining certification. This exacerbates the teacher shortage and the diversity gap, and undermines efforts to mitigate them.
Then there are the expenses involved with the TPA process which, while temporarily waived during the pandemic, have been resumed. The TPA consists of two cycles, each one costing $150. This is in addition to the California Subject Examinations for Teachers (CSET), which also costs anywhere from a minimum of $63 up to a few hundred dollars. Furthermore, there is the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA), which costs over $200.
These fees are all in addition to the expenses student teachers are already paying while completing their coursework, such as tuition, books, supplies and living expenses. And it’s helpful to remember that many student teachers are trying to make ends meet — while raising families, in many cases — with juggling the full responsibilities of leading classrooms of 30-plus students and completing coursework requirements and, at the same time, having to fulfill the stringent requirements of the TPA within the one year they are allotted upon registration.
Yet, despite the steep costs and stress of the TPAs that student teachers face on top of juggling so many other challenges, there is often also a lack of support from the teacher preparation programs they are enrolled in, as well as insufficient support from state and local government.
This is why providing concrete support, both financially and educationally, for student teachers is one of my priorities as interim dean for the school of education at Notre Dame de Namur University. If we can’t relieve student teachers of the burden of TPAs, then we can at least alleviate the burden of some of their expenses and provide as much educational support as possible while they navigate the TPA process.
Based on our research at CARE-ED and the CTA and our many collective years of working with student teachers, we believe the best-case-scenario would be to pass SB 1263 as it was originally written. But since the bill has been modified, I would urge that at the very least the review panel that has been proposed in lieu of removing the TPAs have fair representation.
This means that representation from the CTC, the aforementioned agency tasked with overseeing the TPA, should be minimal, and there must be a just representation of teacher educators and, most importantly, teachers themselves, because they are the ones who best understand the realities of teaching and what they need to do their jobs. This is critically important. Otherwise we run the risk of losing this precious opportunity to address California’s teacher shortage and lack of teacher diversity in a way that could make a real difference.
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Tseh-sien Kelly Vaughn, Ph.D., is the interim dean of the school of education at Notre Dame de Namur University.
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