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  • Pressure from education advocates ends effort to eliminate teacher assessment

    Pressure from education advocates ends effort to eliminate teacher assessment


    Senate Bill 1263 will be heard by the full Assembly if it makes it through the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

    Credit: AP Photo/Terry Chea

    A controversial bill that would have eliminated teaching performance assessments — the last licensure test California teacher candidates are required to take — has been dramatically revised under pressure from education advocacy groups.

    Senate Bill 1263, sponsored by the California Teachers Association (CTA), would have ended the requirement that teacher candidates take video clips of classroom instruction, submit lesson plans, student work and written reflections on their practice to prove they are prepared to become teachers.

    In mid-June, the bill was amended to retain the teaching performance assessments, with a provision that the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing convene a working group of teachers, college education faculty and performance assessment experts to review the assessments and recommend changes. 

    The revised bill, if passed, would require the commission to approve recommendations from the work group by July 1, 2025, and to implement them within three years from that date. The commission also would be required to make annual reports to the Legislature. 

    Leslie Littman, CTA vice president, said that the amendments retaining the test were “disappointing” but that the creation of the work group is a positive step toward addressing the concerns that union members have had with the assessment.

    “I think that the way it was going to go, possibly the bill might not have made it out of the Legislature,” Littman said.

    Many teachers say the test is a waste of time

    Senate Bill 1263 was originally introduced by Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, chair of the Senate Education Committee, who said in April that eliminating the assessment would encourage more people to enter the teaching profession. He also said that it duplicates other requirements teachers must fulfill to earn a credential.

    K-12 teachers who commented on EdSource stories about the legislation were overwhelmingly critical of the assessment, stating that it is too time-consuming, caused anxiety and does not help prepare teachers for the classroom.

    California teacher candidates must pass either the California Teaching Performance Assessment (CalTPA), the Educative Teaching Performance Assessment (edTPA) or the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers (FAST) before they can earn a preliminary teaching credential. The tests cost $300 total, or $150 per cycle, according to Littman.

    Education advocates call the test a valuable tool

    Proponents of the teacher performance assessments, however, say that eliminating them would have removed a valuable tool for evaluating teacher preparation programs and new teachers.  

    “We know when parents drop kids off at school, the most important thing in front of those kids is that teacher, and they want to make sure … that teacher is prepared to teach effectively, and that’s what the TPAs help do,” said Marshall Tuck, CEO of EdVoice, an education advocacy organization.

    Criticism of the bill to eliminate the assessment grew when its authors amended it in late spring to remove the requirement that candidates for a preliminary, multiple-subject or education specialist credential pass a test that evaluates their ability to teach reading. 

    The move came less than three years after legislators passed Senate Bill 488, which next July will replace the unpopular written Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA) with a literacy teaching performance assessment. The Commission on Teacher Credentialing spent more than a year developing the assessment with the help of a working group of literacy experts. 

    Resistance against legislation built

    “Unsurprisingly, we got a little pushback from the Commission on Teaching Credentialing and some other folks who are stakeholders in this, including EdTrust-West and, not unimportantly, PTA groups,” Newman told EdSource on Wednesday. 

    After the legislation moved to the Assembly in late May, Education Committee Chair Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, began meeting with stakeholders, including the California Teachers Association, to discuss possible changes to the legislation. Representatives from the Commission on Teacher Credentialing also made their case for retaining the assessment to legislators.

    Education advocates showed up at a public hearing and also reached out to legislators and their staff, Tuck said. In early June, 13 education advocacy organizations, including EdVoice, signed a letter in opposition to the legislation.

    By June 17, the legislation had changed considerably.

    Legislation charges commission with more oversight 

    Along with retaining the teaching performance assessments, the proposed legislation would require the commission to report the number of teaching preparation programs with low passing rates on the assessment. The commission would be charged with helping these programs learn how to better prepare teacher candidates. 

    The commission also would be required to maintain a secondary passing standard for the assessment that takes into consideration other evidence of a teacher candidate’s performance.

    “ETW is hopeful that SB 1263 will now help to streamline and improve the administration and scoring of TPAs to ensure they are an additive, constructive experience for candidates, and that they do not have a disparate impact for candidates of color,” said Brian Rivas, senior director of policy and government relations for EdTrust-West (ETW), an education advocacy organization, in a letter to Assembly Appropriations Committee Chair Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland. “Doing so is critical for both addressing the state’s shortage of teachers of color and providing all students with teachers who are fully prepared to teach. For these reasons, we are pleased to support SB 1263.”

    The legislation has an annual price tag of $598,000, with $145,000 in start-up costs, according to a state analysis. It is currently being considered by the Assembly Appropriations Committee.  

    Revised bill a good compromise

    Tuck says the revised bill is an example of policy creation working correctly.

    “I think that strong pushback from advocacy organizations, as well as from the CTC (Commission on Teacher Credentialing), really helped to shift the direction of the bill,” he said. 

    Rivas said Newman likely “read the tea leaves” and realized he might have a fight on his hands if he got the bill to the governor’s desk. 

    Newman sees the compromise as a good outcome.

    “Legislation, sort of by definition, is a negotiation,” Newman said. “It was a commitment by the CTC to take a good, hard look and to reassess … the teacher performance assessment, so that it is not only less onerous but that it takes into account the existing demands on teaching candidates and also made sure that the assessment was fully relevant to the kind of skills and requirements that we are seeking from them.”

    The amendments are enough for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, EdTrust-West and other advocacy groups, to change course and support it.

    “The commission welcomes the opportunity to engage with educators, teacher education faculty and the larger communities of interest to review and strengthen this important part of California’s teacher preparation system,” said Marquita Grenot-Scheyer, chair, and Mary Vixie Sandy, executive director of the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, in a joint letter to Muratsuchi in late June. “As amended, SB 1263 (Newman) aligns with the commission’s commitment to the process of continuous improvement, and the commission enthusiastically supports its passage.”

    But this doesn’t mean the issue won’t return.

    “It doesn’t preclude us from watching and seeing what happens in this work group,” CTA’s Littman said. “Then it doesn’t stop us down the road from bringing legislation back.” 





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  • California still lags behind pre-pandemic reading and math scores on national assessment

    California still lags behind pre-pandemic reading and math scores on national assessment


    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Like most of the nation, California students were stuck in low gear again in 2024. On the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), they performed significantly below their pre-pandemic scores in math and reading.

    The gaps between the lowest-performing students, between low-income and well-off students, and among some racial and ethnic groups continued to widen overall, an ominous sign that many students are unprepared for high school and beyond.

    “Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, noting that nationwide, the percentage of eighth graders reading Below Basic, the lowest achievers, was 33% and the highest in the assessment’s history. The 40% of fourth graders scoring Below Basic was the highest in 20 years. 

    On the fourth grade reading assessment for NAEP, scores in five states, in light blue, declined compared with 2022, no states’ scores improved, and 47 states, including California, saw no statistically significant change.
    Credit: National Assessment of Educational Progress

    Also known as The Nation’s Report Card, NAEP is the only assessment that a representative number of students in fourth, eighth, and 12th grades in every state and Washington, D.C., take every two years—and thus, the most reliable measure of performance among states. The results for fourth and eighth graders were released today.

    On NAEP’s 500-point scale, where one or 2-point gains are common, and movement of 3 or more points are notable, California’s scores have consistently trailed the nation in both reading and math, although the gap in reading has narrowed. That had been especially so for eighth graders, whose score equaled the nation’s in 2022.

    But that result was the exception in a year in which scores fell sharply nationally and to a lesser extent in California in the aftermath of the pandemic and slow recovery. Nationally, math scores in 2022 dropped 8 points in eighth grade and 5 points in fourth, the largest drop in NAEP’s 25-year history.

    The latest scores show mostly no progress. Scores in fourth and eighth grade reading fell again, leaving California 9 points and the nation 8 points below 2017. Math was mixed — up in fourth grade, but not enough to catch 2019, with eighth grade taking another dip.

    The average scores, however, mask widening disparities between the highest and lowest-performing students. On fourth grade reading, student scores at the 90th achievement percentile fell 1 point between 2019 and 2024, and scores at the 75th percentile fell 3 points. However, scores for students in the 10th percentile fell 10 points, and for students in the 25th percentile, they fell 8 points.  

    The pattern looks about the same throughout the nation, with a serious long-term impact, said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who also was provided an early peek at the scores. “The top scorers are coming back, and the bottom is doing worse, which will affect income distribution over a lifetime,” he said.

    On fourth grade reading, California scored higher than three states (West Virginia, New Mexico, and Alaska), statistically about the same as 35 other states and behind 13 states. Only two states, Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math, scored above pre-pandemic levels of 2019.

    NAEP scores fall within four bands of achievement: Advanced, Proficient, Basic and Below Basic. The differences by race and ethnicity remained stark on all the tests. For example, on the fourth grade reading test, 7% of Black students and 19% of Latino students scored Proficient and Advanced, while 50% of Asian and 44% of white students scored that high.

    For all students, only 31% of California’s fourth graders scored Proficient or Advanced, compared with 32% nationally.

    NAEP defines students performing at the Basic level as having partially mastered knowledge and skills required to perform at a Proficient level. Proficient students have demonstrated a grasp of challenging material and can apply the knowledge to real-world situations and analytical skills. Advanced students showed superior performance.

    Scoring Below Basic doesn’t mean students in fourth grade can’t read. “We’re saying that they’re unlikely to be able to determine the meaning of a familiar word using context from the text. That’s a critical skill that students will really need for entering middle school,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent body that Congress created to set policy for NAEP.

    Once education experts and advocates have had a chance to review the results and findings of surveys that the National Center for Educational Statistics conducted of students and teachers, there will be theories for the low scores and calls for efforts to address them. 

    In The 74 earlier this week, columnist Chad Aldeman evaluated a half-dozen explanations for declining scores nationwide. They include less reading and more TikTok; the abandonment of federal accountability for school performance, starting in the latter years of the Obama administration; the adoption of Common Core state standards a decade ago; and soaring student absenteeism rates post-Covid. While they have come down, the rates remain disproportionately high for the lowest-performing students, contributing to widening gaps in achievement.

    Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research and one of a few education experts who got an early look at the NAEP results, would add another cause to the mix: emerging evidence of grade inflation, connected to the pandemic, and perceptions parents have of their own children’s learning. 

    “So the most immediate information that parents get is not state or NAEP tests. It’s (high) grades that are not showing parents where their kids stand in real time, to allow them to provide feedback to their kids and encourage them.”

    Goldhaber said there is evidence that teacher quality is largely what moves students; he’d focus on the inequitable distribution of schools with less qualified and credentialed teachers.

    Not comparable to Smarter Balanced

    Students also take annual state tests in math and English language arts, but NAEP officials warn not to make comparisons since each state’s measurements and standards are different. California aligns its tests to the Common Core standards, while NAEP’s tests are based on what experts say students in each grade should know. It’s harder to score Proficient or above on NAEP than on most state tests. In 2024, 44% of all California fourth graders students scored at or above Proficient on the Smarter Balanced test.

    About 11,000 students in California took NAEP, and only portions of it. That’s too few for individual students, schools, and districts to receive scores, with one exception. Annually, a representative number of students in 25 large districts, including Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified, take the Trial Urban District Assessment or TUDA. They provided one of the few bright spots in 2024.

    Los Angeles was one of three districts whose fourth grade math scores didn’t drop during the pandemic; it rose slightly from 2019 to 2024, and San Diego’s fell less than 2 points, a statistically insignificant amount. In eighth grade, Los Angeles dropped less than a point, and San Diego’s 8-point drop was lower than the national average for the districts. Los Angeles’ reading scores in fourth and eighth grade didn’t decline at all post-pandemic; San Diego’s increased a statistically insignificant amount in fourth grade, and its decline of 3 points was about the average for the TUDA districts.  

    California’s low percentage of students scoring Proficient or better on fourth grade reading and math (34% Proficient in fourth grade, 29% in eighth grade) will likely lead to calls for funding for teacher training on the new standards and evidence-based practices in kindergarten through second grade. 

    Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed allocating $500 million in the 2025-26 budget for teacher training and to encourage districts to use discretionary funding on summer programs and tutoring to make up for lost Covid learning. Some states whose scores exceeded California’s on fourth-grade reading, including Mississippi, Connecticut and Colorado, adopted comprehensive reading plans grounded in the science of reading.





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