U.S.A: Regents Drop Teacher Literacy Test Seen as Discriminatory

The Board of Regents on Monday eliminated a requirement that aspiring teachers in New York State pass a literacy test to become certified after the test proved controversial because black and Hispanic candidates passed it at significantly lower rates than white candidates.

The Regents also moved forward with a proposal that would allow some students who failed another test, aimed at evaluating practical skills like lesson planning and assessment, to be certified as teachers based on their grades and professors’ recommendations.

Together, the steps signal how much the Regents’ approach has changed under the current chancellor, Betty A. Rosa, after several years of efforts to raise the bar for entering the profession.

Under the previous chancellor, Merryl H. Tisch, the state created a set of more rigorous licensing exams. Among them was the Academic Literacy Skills Test, or ALST, which was intended to assess reading and analytical writing skills, and the edTPA, which requires candidates to submit a portfolio of work, including unedited videos of them interacting with students.

The literacy test proved challenging to many prospective teachers, but particularly for black and Hispanic candidates. An analysis done in 2014, the year the test was first administered, found that 64 percent of white candidates passed the test on the first try, while only 46 percent of Hispanic candidates and 41 percent of black candidates did.

Nonetheless, a federal judge who had found two older certification tests to be discriminatory ruled in 2015 that the ALST was not biased, because it measured skills that were necessary for teaching.

However, deans of education schools, especially those with large numbers of black and Hispanic students, disagreed, and argued that the exam was exacerbating a shortage of teachers of color. More than 80 percent of public-school teachers in the country are white, according to the federal Education Department, while a majority of public school students are not.

Others said that the exam was redundant, given the other requirements to become a teacher.

Michael Middleton, dean of the Hunter College School of Education, said in an interview on Monday that the battery of exams currently required of teacher candidates — four, in most cases — was onerous and expensive, and that eliminating the ALST was appropriate.

“We already know that our licensure candidates have a bachelor’s degree, which in my mind means they have basic literacy and communication skills,” Dr. Middleton said.

The state Education Department has said it will review another required licensing test, the Educating All Students exam, which measures teachers’ skills at reaching students with disabilities and those learning English, to see if it should be adjusted to also assess literacy skills.

The edTPA has not proved as difficult as the ALST: The overall pass rate is 77 percent, according to the state Education Department. But black candidates pass the test at rates lower than candidates of other races or ethnicities. A task force convened by the Regents, made up of deans and professors of education schools, as well as teachers and district superintendents, recommended recalibrating the passing score on the exam and allowing certain students who fall short of a passing score on the edTPA to become certified based on the recommendations of their teachers. The Regents agreed on Monday to move forward with that proposal.

Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said that eliminating the literacy exam because of minority candidates’ performance on it was the wrong response.

“What we are effectively doing is perpetuating a cycle of underperformance,” she said.

“People are showing a tremendous amount of weakness by just backpedaling because they feel like it’s the politically sensible thing to do,” she added.

Even before Monday’s actions, the Regents had backed off the tougher requirements, instituting safety nets that allowed candidates who failed the edTPA to try to pass an older test to qualify, and allowed those who failed the ALST to show through their coursework and grades that they had the skills that the test measures.