Abstract
This chapter reviews the particular affordances and constraints of the intersection of privatization, performance assessment, policy, and professionalization in a secondary social studies teacher education program during the initial implementation of the secondary social studies edTPA and its impact on our adolescent (grades 7–12) teacher education program in New York. We begin with the content challenges that have confounded social studies from its origins, and how this intersected with the standards movement described in Chap. 2. We discuss how a concern for the transmission of a common national heritage, orderly classrooms, and more recently high-stakes testing in social studies have led to classroom practice emphasizing lower order recall of events. We then describe how the edTPA, with its emphasis on a central social science focus and analysis, supports teacher professionalism and troubles current classroom practice. In this context, we discuss the affordances and constraints of mandated, high-stakes performance assessment in social studies teacher education as they become explicit in the first year of implementation in an urban teacher preparation program, where state policy mandated the edTPA performance assessment as a requirement for initial certification. Initial results, including pass rates, are reported, along with anecdotal data about students’ reactions to the program and its implementation of the edTPA, and their reactions to the edTPA itself.
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Gurl, T.J., Caraballo, L., Grey, L., Gunn, J.H., Gerwin, D., Bembenutty, H. (2016). Professionalization, Policy, Performance Assessment, and Privatization in Social Studies. In: Policy, Professionalization, Privatization, and Performance Assessment. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29146-8_6
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