Eliminating the edTPA to improve teacher diversity
When educators identify policies that hurt our students and our profession, we take action together to make change. Our students need more educators in the classroom who look like them. But we have so many hurdles and expenses involved in becoming a teacher that future educators of color are deterred from the profession. That’s why we’ve worked to eliminate the edTPA.
“We cannot be doing this to our students and educators,” remarked Price Jimerson, president of the Student Washington Education Association. “We keep wondering why we don’t have enough teachers when we have hurdles like this.”
The edTPA, currently required to earn a resident teaching certificate, costs hundreds of dollars and requires student teachers to submit video clips of them leading classrooms, submit a portfolio including essays and lesson plans, and pass a written exam. Educators have already completed student teaching and been assessed by their teaching mentor.
“The time I spent on completing the edTPA would have been better spent learning how to better educate my students,” testified Sobia Sheikh, a mathematics teacher at Mariner High School in Mukilteo. “And research shows that because of the bias of the test, educators of color score lower than white educators.”
WEA leaders including Jimerson and Sheik spent years working with the Professional Educator Standards Board and now the state legislature to bring the proposal to eliminate the edTPA this far.
“Educators are putting 100 hours into this exam, and then told there are too many students in their class with their cameras off, and being rejected,” noted Rep. Steve Bergquist, who is also a substitute teacher in the Renton School District. “Teachers are flummoxed about why they didn’t pass, after paying $300 for this test.”
HB 1028 to eliminate the edTPA has passed the House and was heard on Wednesday, March 10 in the Senate Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee. WEA members from across the state spoke in favor of the bill, sharing their frustration with the unnecessary and expensive exam and calling for the bill’s passage.
