Starting in spring 2024, students who have completed teacher preparation programs in New Jersey will no longer have to take an expensive and much-maligned certification test called the Educative Teacher Performative Assessment, or EdTPA.
Instead, new teachers will take similar tests conducted by their programs before graduating, according to a bill signed into law Friday by Gov. Phil Murphy.
The new law prevents the state board of education from requiring a certification test like this for future teachers, but transfers the burden for designing and conducting that test to teacher-training programs at state colleges.
The law comes as New Jersey and the nation face critical teacher shortages.
It also means that students enrolled in teacher education programs and graduating in spring 2023 will still have to take the edTPA, said Dan Katz, a professor at Seton Hall University. Had the bill been released a little earlier, in September, programs might have been able to put in place a test of their own for next year’s graduates, while staying compliant with the law, Katz said. The test costs around $300 and is conducted by testing company Pearson, Inc.
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The original bill to eliminate the edTPA had near unanimous support from education groups and advocates, including the New Jersey Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the state’s largest teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association. They advocated to end the requirement to take the test, or make it optional. Murphy issued a conditional veto in September, meaning he recommended changes in the bill before he would sign in into law. By removing the external test and requiring collegiate teacher preparation programs to conduct their own, pre-service teachers will still have to show their effectiveness in the classroom and reach beyond theory, a priority that Murphy described in his veto.
“Given the value of performance-based assessments, I cannot support making them an optional component of the teaching certification process. However, I believe the process can be improved by transferring the authority to select performance-based assessments from the Commissioner of Education to the Educator Preparation Programs themselves,” Murphy said in the conditional veto. He went on to say that colleges “know their candidates best and are best-positioned” to assess them.
State lawmakers approved Murphy’s recommendations unanimously and the bill passed both houses in October. Its supporters welcomed the changes as a step toward reducing obstacles to becoming a certified teacher, but stopped short of praising it completely.
The law also exempts graduates of teacher training programs in 2020, 2021 and 2022 who were unable to take the edTPA or a similar requirement because of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as “abrupt changes in teaching placements or modalities, asynchronous virtual learning environments and school district policies or other restrictions” from the public health emergency.
The state should be assisting rather than obstructing teacher candidates in the midst of a teacher shortage, said the bill’s original sponsors, state Sen. Shirley Turner and Assemblyman Anthony Verrelli, both Democrats representing Hunterdon and Mercer counties. Turner welcomed the law, saying that the edTPA was a “costly, unnecessary, and unreliable exam that has complicated the accreditation process for teaching candidates.”