3 days ago
New state law streamlines teacher licensing for Mount St. Mary's, other Md. institutions
A new Maryland law will make teacher licensing more streamlined, education officials say.
Before House Bill 888 was signed into law last month by Gov. Wes Moore, colleges and universities in Maryland were required to administer one of two performance-based assessments to students seeking a teaching license.
One assessment is the Praxis Performance Assessment for Teachers (PPAT), which is created by Pearson, an education company, and will be retired in December.
The other is the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), which is created by the Educational Testing Service and currently being redeveloped.
Completing one of those assessments became mandatory after an omnibus state bill intending to make teacher certification more efficient was signed last year.
Faculty members at the Mount St. Mary's University School of Education said the bill instead created a financial and time-consuming barrier for their students to receive certification, since the university's program already has a nationally accredited performance-based assessment.
House Bill 888, sponsored by Delegates Kris Fair (D-3A), Ken Kerr (D-3) and Eric Ebersole (D-44A) from Baltimore County, makes administering the assessment optional for colleges and universities that have a nationally accredited educator program.
The Mount's teacher preparation program, which includes a portfolio assessment, was accredited through 2029 by the Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation.
Stacey Brown-Hobbs, who was recently promoted from the chair and director of teacher education to the dean of the School of Education at the Mount, said in an interview that the university's assessments 'go through a very rigorous process during the accreditation process.'
'We were like, why are we making our students do this other assessment when we already are doing something, and we're accredited?' she said.
Brown-Hobbs added that states such as New York, Georgia and New Jersey were moving away from the PPAT and edTPA assessments because 'research is showing us that this is not an effective tool. This is not a good predictor.'
'This is a licensure test that's very time consuming for our students at a time when they are trying to begin to learn about the practice of teaching in their internship setting,' she said. 'It's distracting them from really concentrating on the feedback that they're getting from their mentors and supervisors.'
Barbara Marinak, the former dean of the Mount's education school who was recently appointed as interim provost, said in an interview that Maryland is in a 'dramatic' teacher shortage.
She said the intention of legislation mandating the assessments was never to make the process 'more onerous. The intent was to fully support and recognize rigorous paths to licensure.'
Marinak added that schools in Maryland can still choose to administer edTPA for their students to receive teaching licenses, and that this bill gives colleges and universities options.
Marinak said she and Brown-Hobbs spoke with Darren Hornbeck, a longtime Frederick County Public Schools educator and the chair of the Professional Standards and Teacher Education Board under the Maryland State Department of Education. Hornbeck helped drive the change.
Hornbeck also discussed with Fair how local legislation could remove that barrier for aspiring educators.
In the 2001-02 school year, Fair was Hornbeck's teaching assistant at Linganore High School, which Hornbeck said in an interview was 'just such a gratifying thing.'
'Who would have known, like 20 years later, that student who I had sitting three rows back would be producing very meaningful legislation that would help future teachers,' he said.
Hornbeck said some schools see the performance assessment as useful because it requires technical writing skill.
'But not all schools were in that boat,' he said. 'Other schools thought they were achieving it in other ways, so we wanted to remove it as a barrier to teachers coming into the profession because of its cost and potential redundancy.'
Hornbeck added that the legislation is not meant to decrease standards to receive a teaching license, but to reduce costs and redundancy to students in teacher programs that are nationally accredited.
Fair in an interview said working with Hornbeck, who he considers a mentor, felt like a 'full circle moment.'
'It was just really cool to be able to take a challenge that he brought to me and be able to help him fix it,' he said.
Fair said while Maryland works hard to certify teachers and encourage them to work in the state, 'we really need to be looking holistically at any barrier to employment for teachers here.'
