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Q&A with Linda Darling-Hammond

The Case for a National Teacher Test

As states prepare to meet the No Child Left Behind mandate for highly qualified teachers, a national panel is urging federal and state policymakers to raise teacher education standards and institute a national teacher test.

The National Academy of Education panel issued its 112-page report, “A Good Teacher in Every Classroom,” in May, 2005. It calls for all teacher preparation programs to ensure that their students have both content and pedagogical knowledge: that they know what to teach as well as how to teach it to meet the needs of different learners.

Among the more publicized recommendations of the panel was one calling on Congress to underwrite development of a national teacher test with the results being incorporated into state licensing requirements.

Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond was one of two editors of the panel’s report. In an interview with Northwest Education, she commented at length on the task of identifying a common core of professional knowledge to be tested and ensuring that it’s delivered consistently:

“I think we know a lot about what the common core of professional knowledge is. Back in the 1980s, a book came out from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) called The Knowledge Base for the Beginning Teacher. Around the same time, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards developed its standards for accomplished teaching, which were strongly compatible with the AACTE effort because the research has been building for decades about how people learn, how to teach them effectively, and what kind of teaching practices are most effective. After that, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC)—30 states that joined together under the Chief State School Officers—created standards for beginning teacher licensing that most states have now adopted. … So there’s been a process of professionalization going on for about 20 years in the teaching profession.

“The National Academy’s new book, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World, brought together teachers, teacher educators, and scholars to [ask] what do we know that ought to inform a core curriculum for teacher education? [It] has been very well received by folks in the field who say 'yes, this helps us take it to the next step.’ The notion of a common knowledge base is becoming more solidified; clearly every profession’s knowledge base always changes, always grows, always evolves. It’s never set in stone, but we know a lot more than we did.

“When the academy called for teacher tests, the point of that was not to get yet another multiple choice test of teaching created by nonteachers. [That] is the problem we have with most teacher tests right now; they’re not good exemplars of whether you can teach or not. But, it was to push toward performance assessment for teachers.

“We have had experience now with the National Board for Professional Teaching standards and the portfolios that teachers complete for the board’s assessment (explaining why and how they do what they do, showing their students’ work) and those are scored by other expert teachers in the same teaching field who have the training to do that reliably. We now have four different studies that have come out in the last two years which show that teachers who are certified through the board’s assessment are more effective in producing student learning.

“There are some emerging efforts to do something similar at the beginning teacher level. Connecticut has similar portfolios for the second-year teacher before they’re professionally licensed; schools in Wisconsin and California have developed similar portfolios that are used in preservice as the basis for an initial license. California’s PACT—Performance Assessment for California Teachers—is being used by 17 or so colleges and universities in California to provide an opportunity for student teachers just before they complete their student teaching to show they can plan a unit of instruction, can teach it, can reflect on their teaching, can adapt it to their students’ learning and responses, can evaluate what students have learned, can adjust what they do for English language learners: all the things you’d expect a teacher to be able to do.

“What we find with these assessments is that not only are they better representations of teaching—they’re fairer and more productive tests than most of what is used—but they’re a good learning experience. …So the profession needs to take hold of this question of assessment and insist on assessments that are useful and reflective of good teaching, in lieu of tests that don’t tell us very much about whether somebody knows what they need to know or can do what they need to do in order to be a good teacher.”