The Teachers Who Oppose Tests

Like everyone else I spoke with, Steiner acknowledged that teacher-licensing exams have disparate racial pass rates, and he pointed out significant flaws in the edT.P.A. that, in his mind, could justify New York’s decision to end its use, such as an emphasis on writing about teaching over actual teaching experience. But, ultimately, he said, “you can’t design a test around teaching methods if you can’t agree on what actually counts as effective.” America doesn’t just have a problem with a lack of teachers and a lack of teacher diversity. “We can’t agree on what good teaching is in the first place,” Steiner said. “And that’s something no one will talk about.”

In her finding against New York City, Judge Wood noted that the makers of the LAST never compiled a list of the tasks that teachers are supposed to perform, nor did they try to figure out whether the knowledge tested on the LAST was relevant to those tasks. Although this reasoning is important in court, it seems to miss something fundamental about education. Teachers are not garbagemen or accountants, charged with discrete, concrete duties. Their job is much broader, and more subtle: to fill students’ minds and equip them to venture out into the world.

New York has cycled through at least four licensure exams since the late nineteen-eighties, always eventually dropping them. But it’s not clear that any of these changes have actually improved students’ education. Since the pandemic, New York State has tumbled in the national ranking of performance in reading and math for fourth graders. This past school year, only half of New York City’s third-to-eighth graders achieved proficient reading scores, and among Black and Latino students, that figure was closer to forty per cent. Schaeffer, of FairTest, has come to view teacher-licensing exams as nothing more than performative symbols—something for states and unions to point to in order to prove that teachers actually know something. “They’re like the talisman that you wore around your neck in the Middle Ages to ward off the plague,” he said, paraphrasing an old article about flaws in testing. “The evidence for their efficacy is weak and self-serving.”

Even if states could devise the perfect test for teachers, fewer and fewer people are entering the profession. The pay isn’t great: the Census Bureau reports that teachers make less on average than their peers with the same education level, and teacher pay has fallen over all since 2010. The pandemic made a difficult profession harder: reports of mental-health crises, unmanageable classrooms, and staggering learning loss are everywhere.

All this has primed the field of education for an anti-test moment. “Because of this shortage of teachers, we’re going to have to become more creative about how we identify who could be a good teacher,” Pedro Noguera, the dean of the School of Education at the University of Southern California, said. “Several people over the years, myself included, have been arguing that you can’t simply rely on a test.” Schaeffer described the opposition to testing culture—from licensure exams to student evaluations that affect teachers’ bonuses and performance reviews—as “widespread” within teachers’ colleges.

In recent years, thousands of teachers who failed the LAST have received compensation for damages. Some of these people remained in education—maybe they moved to New Jersey, where testing cutoff scores were lower, or stuck with lower-paying substitute-teacher positions in New York. After a few years in limbo, Wilds-Bethea finally got a guidance-counsellor job at a school—what he had always wanted, anyway. Because of previous litigation, guidance counsellors were considered social-services employees, not teachers, so he was exempt from the LAST requirement and could regain a full-time position with benefits. He had a long career working in New York City public schools and retired in 2016. He lives in Harlem, neighboring some of his former students, in a sun-filled apartment with a terrace covered in plants overlooking City College, where he got his teaching degree. The testing saga didn’t completely derail his career. But he knows plenty of teachers whose lives truly changed: people who lost their houses or their pensions, or who couldn’t afford to put kids through college.

Wilds-Bethea still hasn’t seen any money from the lawsuit; litigation over each individual payout is ongoing. Given that he worked in New York City public schools for many years while the litigation was ongoing, though, the amount is likely to be large. Ultimately, he sees the whole thing as a tragedy. “I think the money could have been much better spent improving our schools,” he said. “That’s kind of painful, too.” He wishes that all those years ago, the city would have granted an exemption to already licensed teachers and avoided the lawsuit, along with the billions it will cost the city. Kids won’t see any of that money, but lawyers will. So far, the plaintiffs have been awarded at least $57.2 million in attorneys’ fees. Sohn, the lead lawyer in the case, defended the need to resolve this dispute in court: “When I started this case, I thought that we could make people do the right thing. And it’s become really clear that we can just make them stop doing the wrong thing,” he said. That’s “an incredible service to our communities.”

Now some of these plaintiffs will have their lives changed once again because of a test. Payouts in the one-to-two-million range are not unheard of. The judgment also gives some plaintiffs a path to restoring their licenses to teach in New York City. These plaintiffs will have the chance to start over, but they may not want to take it. Many of them are well past the age when they might want to begin a new chapter of their career. As one of Wilds-Bethea’s Committee bulletins put it, years ago, “Many of the teachers affected are enthusiastic young people who have come to our profession with a great deal of energy and idealism. They want to do a good job and are being cut off before they even start.” ♦