Fact sheet on how edTPA affects your child’s privacy and what you can do about it:
edTPA and Student Privacy: What you need to know
The edTPA is a standardized assessment of teacher performance created by Stanford University and sold and administered by Pearson, the world’s largest education company. As of September 2015, edTPA is a high-stakes test for student teachers in Illinois. They must participate in the edTPA by submitting a portfolio to Pearson and receive a minimum score to become a licensed teacher. As part of an edTPA portfolio, a student teacher must include one or two videos up to 35 minutes long of the student teacher interacting with his/her students in class.
There is no reason that student teacher cannot be evaluated by expert teacher educators via live observations in the classroom. This presents a very limited or no student privacy/confidentiality issue with respect to students’ educational records.
Personally identifiable information about individual children in our public school classrooms does not need to be shared and should not be shared with any agencies outside the school walls in order to evaluate teacher candidates.
The State of Illinois should not be asking parents to consent to handing over their child’s personally identifiable information to Pearson for a high-stakes standardized assessment of high cost and low quality that detracts from both students’ and student teachers’ educational experiences.
Once again, student privacy, authentic assessment and educational professionalism are all being sacrificed to a for-profit company with a terrible track record.
More information on edTPA