By Emily Hodge, Rachel Garver, & Drew Gitomer
As teacher preparation became increasingly institutionalized as a field of university-based study in the early 1900s (Lagemann, 2000), educator preparation programs (EPPs) became subject to critiques of their content, pedagogy, and perceived monopoly on the U.S. teacher supply (Zeichner, 2003). In the 1990s, the tensions between university-based teacher educators who sought to professionalize educator preparation through raising standards for entry into the profession and those who sought to deregulate entry through alternate route programs reached a fever pitch (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001; Zeichner, 2003). Although federal policy tended to value deregulation as part of broader standards-based reform and accountability packages (Cohen-Vogel & Hunt, 2007; Mehta, 2013), many states required programs to be nationally accredited, among other measures of high standards for licensure, even as they increasingly supported alternate route certification. When many states adopted performance assessments as licensure requirements, many viewed the rapid and widespread adoption of the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) in particular as a high-water mark for the professionalization agenda (Hutt et al., 2018).
However, as we described in our last blog post, at least 11 of the 19 states that mandated edTPA for licensure as of 2019 have now eliminated this requirement. In general, removing a requirement for licensure seems like a “win” for deregulation, but we wonder if, at least in New Jersey, this policy change indicates a more complicated story about the tensions between the professionalization and deregulation of teachers and teaching as a field.
In particular, we wonder if this devolution of authority back to programs, with some limited oversight from the state, may actually increase professionalization. Professionalism is often defined by greater internal control within a field (Hodge et al., 2023): Post-edTPA, each EPP is implementing a locally designed performance assessment as a licensure requirement and is simply required to communicate to the state which of their teacher candidates have passed this assessment according to their own internally-developed criteria.
Rather than mandating an externally scored, one-size-fits-all assessment, allowing this requirement to be locally determined and evaluated by individual EPPs could be interpreted as legitimizing and enhancing the professionalism of teacher education. The scaled-up version of the edTPA led to concerns that testing companies like Pearson that administered the assessment had too much influence on who enters the field. In discussions of the policy change with teacher education program leaders, they reported widespread support among teacher educators, teachers, school administrators, and the organizations that represented them. This consensus within the profession has led us to interpret the shift away from edTPA in New Jersey as endorsing the professionalism and discretion of educators within the state, rather than an attempt to lower entry standards into teaching.
While New Jersey is not alone in adopting this reform, in other states the press to remove edTPA may have been more driven by supply and demand—namely, post-COVID educator shortages—and by those who do want to deregulate entry into teaching rather than by the desires of education organizations within the state. Although we have speculated that returning authority to the program level may professionalize teacher education, we are also mindful of ensuring guardrails for equity or quality are not compromised when certain aspects of the system are deregulated. In a complicated policy environment, we think that it is possible that deregulation in the form of removing performance assessment requirements for preservice teachers can lead to both more and less professionalization depending on context.
Drew Gitomer, Ph.D. is a professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, and Emily Hodge, Ph.D. is an associate professor and Rachel Garver, Ph.D. is an associate professor at Montclair State University.
References:
Cochran-Smith, M., & Fries, M. K. (2001). Sticks, stones, and ideology: The discourse of reform in teacher education. Educational Researcher, 30(8), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X030008003
Cohen-Vogel, L., & Hunt, H. (2007). Governing quality in teacher education: Deconstructing federal text and talk. American Journal of Education, 114(1), 137–163. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/520694
Hodge, E., Salloum, S., & Benko, S. (2024). How state educational agency coordinators navigate logics of local control in standards implementation. Educational Policy, 38(2), 391–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/08959048231153595
Hutt, E. L., Gottlieb, J., & Cohen, J. J. (2018). Diffusion in a vacuum: edTPA, legitimacy, and the rhetoric of teacher professionalization. Teaching and Teacher Education, 69, 52–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.09.014
Lagemann, E. C. (2000). An elusive science: The troubling history of education research. University of Chicago Press.
Mehta, J. (2013). How paradigms create politics: The transformation of American educational policy, 1980–2001. American Educational Research Journal, 50(2), 285–324. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831212471417
Zeichner, K. M. (2003). The adequacies and inadequacies of three current strategies to recruit, prepare, and retain the best teachers for all students. Teachers College Record, 105(3), 490–519. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9620.00248