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Monday, February 03, 2003

By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

In Pennsylvania, testing isn't just for prospective teachers.

A year ago, the state began requiring experienced teachers to take the Professional Development Assistance Program tests in reading and math, known as PDAP.

The goal was to test 20 percent of the state's teachers each year for five years to see what professional development they might need. It was based on the premise that teachers should at least know the subjects they were teaching. "You would want your son's fifth-grade teacher to at least know fifth-grade math," said Mari Pearlman, vice president of the division of teaching and learning at Educational Testing Service, which created the PDAP exams.

Individual results are to be released only to the teacher, not the employer. But the tests have been controversial anyway, because of snafus in their administration, questions over how the results would be used and their multi-million-dollar price tag.

It's unclear whether the tests will continue, because Gov. Ed Rendell has said he doesn't support the program.

Vicki Phillips, Rendell's choice for secretary of education, said the PDAP issue is a priority, but the administration hasn't made any decision about the tests.

Robert Strauss, professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said that it's important to take an inventory of teachers' skills.

Without the tests, he said, "It will be a signal nationally that we're not as serious as we said we are about improving education in Pennsylvania."

In the most recent round of PDAP tests, the average statewide score for teachers ranged from 77 percent in middle school math to 84 percent in high school math.

Still, some teachers have complained that the quality of experienced teachers can't be measured by a written test. And some experts acknowledge that a better approach would be evaluating actual classroom performance, like the system developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

The board assesses experienced teachers by using portfolios that typically take 200 to 400 hours to prepare. Among the items in the portfolios are specific types of student work as well as videotapes of the teacher in the classroom and written commentaries by the teacher.

But these kinds of assessments also are expensive. National board certification costs $2,300 per teacher.

Pennsylvania hasn't encouraged teachers to try for national board certification. Only 79 teachers in the state have it, compared with 5,126 in North Carolina, which offers incentives to teachers to go through the process. Nationally, 23,935 teachers are board-certified.

ETS' Pearlman thinks it's more effective to measure experienced teachers using classroom performance than a paper-and-pencil test.

"This kind of evidence accumulated over time is much more powerful than any test," she said.