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School
of Ed. Moves to Boost Pass Rate on Certification Exam
The School of Education has been preparing for a possible upcoming requirement by the state that 80 percent of its students pass the Massachusetts Educator Certification Tests. In November, the Joint Commission on Educator Preparation in the Commonwealth recommended that the Board of Education require the 80 percent pass rate of any higher education institution offering teacher preparation programs that endorses candidates for certification. The board regulates the approval of programs that train and endorse teacher candidates, as well as teacher certification. The commission further recommended that all teacher candidates be required to pass the basic skills portion of the certification tests before student teaching in Massachusetts public schools. The test has two parts. Basic skills are covered in the Communications and Literacy Skills test, which must be passed by all teacher candidates, and areas of specialization are covered in the Subject Tests, among which students must choose in order to specify the sub-field in which they will be certified. In anticipating these requirements, the School of Education has developed a policy that will ensure a high pass rate for its programs and protects students who are unlikely to pass the tests from investing a lot of time before they learn they will not be certified to teach. "We have a policy that says that people have to pass one part of the test before they enter our program," said Jackson Bailey, dean of the school, referring to the basic skills portion of the exam. "They have to pass the subject test before they student teach. Obviously they will have to pass both tests before they graduate." Because federal reporting standards calculate pass rates using only students who have completed a teacher-training program, the University will automatically have a high pass rate. During the first year of the state's teacher certification test, 76.8 percent of University students taking the test passed both sections. Because this pass rate was achieved before substantial study guides were available and under widely criticized testing conditions, professor of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies Irving Seidman believes that, as student and faculty become more familiar with the format and content of the test, the pass rate will easily rise above 80 percent. "We have workshops for just becoming familiar with the tests and hopefully to help them deal with test anxiety," Jackson said. "Our students will do very well on this test," said Seidman, who directs the University's Teacher Education Coordinating Council (TECC). In addition to helping students prepare for the test, faculty at the school are also participating in the debate about the quality and relative worth of the exams. Cathy Luna, assistant professor of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies, said she and others on the TECC are concerned that the test may limit diversity. "A group of people from across the UMass system in K-12 and English education drafted a report about the narrowness of the definition of literacy [on the basic skills portion of the test]," Luna said. "The kind of knowledge it was asking for was very limited and you might even say archaic. A lot of it is questions about language -grammatical knowledge, like definitions of parts of speech." She said the "infamous" dictation section of the test, where examinees are asked to listen to a tape of someone reading a passage three times and transcribe the passage, puts people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds at a disadvantage, which is exacerbated by the conditions under which they take the test. Luna, who taught the preparatory workshops last year, said she heard multiple reports that the sound quality produced by the tape players was poor and that examinees could hear the tapes playing out of unison in other classrooms. "I heard a lot of stories from people who took the tests," she said, "a lot of bureaucratic and logistical headaches. I also heard from students with documented learning disabilities and physical disabilities that weren't properly accommodated. The test was made harder by the conditions under which people took it." "There are teachers that we really need in the system...who are having a very hard time with this gate," she said. "The only positive thing I see about this teacher test is it's a good opportunity to work with pre-service teachers around issues of assessment," Luna said. "I think it helps them think about high-stakes testing for students. It's an interesting opportunity to take a critical look at assessment." "We want to do as much as we can to make the limitations of a paper and pencil test less a factor," Jackson said. "A paper and pencil test is not going to determine whether a person is going to be a good teacher. Clearly the majority of the education community recognize that if we want to have good teachers we need to pay attention to the command they have of the content, but we also need to pay attention to the way in which they deliver that content. We want someone who is able to negotiate varying learning environments well." |
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