Maryland board hears concerns over edTPA rollout, cost and possible impact on teacher pipeline

Chair Kitchen opened the board’s January meeting and framed a statewide conversation about portfolio-based teacher performance assessments, including edTPA and PPAT, that the State Board must implement under law before July 1, 2025. Kelly, a Maryland Department of Education staff member, summarized the department’s recent survey: “As of our last survey… eight institutions [are] using edTPA and four are using the PPAT,” and both products have been adopted by the State Board for this purpose.

Higher-education representatives described how institutions have integrated the assessment into teacher-preparation programs. A Towson University representative said the campus uses an internally set expected score and provides remediation rather than rescoring nationally. Frostburg State University’s speaker said Frostburg has used edTPA more than five years, folded the assessment fee into student costs and helped students access financial aid and waivers during pilot periods. “It is time consuming,” Frostburg’s speaker said, describing the workload for candidates and scorers.

Board members and district leaders raised consistent concerns about costs and downstream effects. Dr. McGee urged the board to explore waivers or other financial supports, noting ETS—one vendor—has offered waivers in pilot phases. A Hartford County superintendent warned that conditional teacher numbers have climbed sharply and said stricter requirements and added costs could increase the pool of conditionally certified teachers, complicating local hiring and budget planning.

The board discussed next steps: staff agreed to request additional data from vendors (including national scoring distributions) and to convene vendors and educator-preparation programs for technical briefings. Members asked colleagues to gather feedback from stakeholder groups, including conditional teachers and higher-education partners, and return with concrete questions and requests for February. Chair Kitchen moved to set the February meeting date to Feb. 8 to allow members to attend a teacher-education summit; the board tentatively penciled Feb. 15 as a snow backup.

The meeting did not set a cut score; Kelly repeated the statutory timeline — that assessments and a cut score are required beginning 07/01/2025 — and staff committed to providing performance data and options for financial supports at a future meeting.