Performance Measures for Teachers and Teacher Education: Corporate Education Reform Opens the Door to New Legal Issues

Pullin, Diana

doi:10.14507/epaa.v23.1980

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Moreover, systems and policies provide further justification and authority by which seemingly natural and neutral differentiation becomes entrenched. The specter of "what counts" in education continues to draw on aggregated data to justify labeling students as types, schools as types, and more recently in the U.S., teachers as types, with Value Added Models and other high-stakes teacher assessment practices shaping teachers' professional lives according to the supposed types of students the tests "prove" theirs to be (e.g., Amrein-Beardsley, 2014;Darling-Hammond, Amrein-Beardsley, Haertl, & Rothstein, 2012;Gabriel & Lester, 2013;Holloway-Libell, 2014;Pullin, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discursive construction of lower-tracked students: Ideologies of meritocracy and the politics of education

Anderson

2015

EPAA

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This study considers the discursive construction of a particular type of student in Singapore - the lowest-tracked, Normal Technical (NT), secondary school student. Shaped by meritocratic policies, educational practices, and ideologies common to many late-modern societies, students in the NT track are institutionally and individually constructed through the results of high-stakes testing regimes and essentialist views of ability. This article extends an understanding of the NT student as a widely held, deficit construction in Singapore by considering its use as an ideological label in interpersonal and institutional discourse. I consider how school leaders’ and government commentaries about NT students’ abilities, opportunities, and supposed characteristics provide insights about the processes through which students are recruited into institutional categories of deficit and risk¾i.e. differentiated instruction, ascribed ability, and these processes’ translation into educational structures and practice in the name of meritocracy. While the illustration of this phenomenon is uniquely Singaporean, implications include concerns about equity, constructions of ability, and ideologies of merit common to late modern society.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discursive construction of lower-tracked students: Ideologies of meritocracy and the politics of education

Anderson

2015

EPAA

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“…However, there is a growing body of independent TPA scholarship in peer-reviewed academic journals. While some of this scholarship focuses on practical aspects of TPAs themselves, thus inadvertently allowing TPA mandates to drive their inquiry, other scholars center the broader political and ideological implications of TPAs a mechanism of neoliberal policy reform (e.g., Greenblatt & O'Hara, 2015;Meuwissin & Chopin, 2015;Pullin, 2015;Ratner & Kolman, 2016;Reagan et al, 2016;Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016). It is upon this foundation that we situate our analysis, as we collectively resist policies that silence the voices of our profession.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Storying teacher education policy: Critical counternarratives of curricular, pedagogical, and activist responses to state-mandated teacher performance assessments

Henning

Dover

Dotson

et al. 2018

EPAA

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The rise of high-stakes, standardized, teacher performance assessments (TPAs) is central to the industry being created out of the regulation, policing, and evaluation of university-based teacher education In addition to reinforcing a narrow and counter-critical framework, TPAs can shift responsibility for the evaluation of teacher candidates from university-based teacher educators with a comprehensive and nuanced fluency in candidates' preparedness to external scorers trained to standardize and depersonalize effective practice. In this article, four social justice-oriented teacher educators from three different states examine the practical and political effects of TPAs in their local contexts. By analyzing the curricular, pedagogical, and political implications of this high-stakes standardization of their field, they speak back to a policy landscape that too often marginalizes the voices of the teachers and students it purports to serve. Throughout, they examine the dilemmas of practice created by TPAs, as teachers and teacher educators seek to redefine what it means to enact justice-oriented professional agency in an increasingly regulated context. A critical counternarrative methodological approach was used to collect and process the authors’ lived stories and then to collaboratively reflect upon each other’s personal/professional experiences with TPAs. Several strategies are identified for enacting agency in response to TPAs, including curricular acts of resistance, resistance through participation in state legislative processes, policymaking within teacher education programs, the production of activist scholarship, and refusal to participate at all. Ways are suggested for teacher educators to minimize, mitigate, and resist unjust policy through curricular, political, and scholarly activism.

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“…D. Baker, Oluwole, & Green, 2013). The purpose of this study was not, however, to examine the broader potential (see, for example, Pullin, 2013, 2014, 2015) and actual legal issues writ large (see, for example, Superfine, 2016), also given researchers in this study are not legal but rather education policy scholars. Rather, the purpose of this study was to examine five real cases, in depth, to make known the education policy and educational measurement issues being both registered and recognized in court from an academic point of view.…”

Section: Purpose Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Teacher-Level Value-Added Models on Trial: Empirical and Pragmatic Issues of Concern Across Five Court Cases

Amrein‐Beardsley

2019

Educational Policy

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Ongoing or recently completed across the United States are a series of lawsuits via which teacher plaintiffs are contesting how they are being evaluated using value-added models (VAMs) as part of states’/districts’ teacher accountability systems. To investigate the empirical and pragmatic matters addressed in court, researchers conducted a case study analysis of the documents submitted for five such cases. Researchers framed analyses using measurement concepts resident within the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, given issues with (a) reliability, (b) validity, (c) bias, (d) transparency, and (e) fairness, with emphases also on (f) whether VAMs are being used to make consequential decisions using concrete (e.g., not arbitrary) evidence, and (g) whether VAMs’ unintended consequences are also of legal pertinence and concern.

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Performance Measures for Teachers and Teacher Education: Corporate Education Reform Opens the Door to New Legal Issues

Cited by 5 publications

References 36 publications

The discursive construction of lower-tracked students: Ideologies of meritocracy and the politics of education

The discursive construction of lower-tracked students: Ideologies of meritocracy and the politics of education

Storying teacher education policy: Critical counternarratives of curricular, pedagogical, and activist responses to state-mandated teacher performance assessments

Teacher-Level Value-Added Models on Trial: Empirical and Pragmatic Issues of Concern Across Five Court Cases

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