Policy Analysis: The Rise and Fall of Missouri’s Performance Assessments of Student Teachers

Missouri’s education policy landscape includes the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), colleges and universities, over 500 school districts, and advocacy groups statewide. Together, these policy actors influence and shape the policies and procedures that impact Missouri schools and students. Balancing the relationships between these actors is essential for creating and maintaining effective policy initiatives in Missouri. When these policy actors are desynchronized, policy implementation may suffer as was true for the Missouri Performance Assessment of Student Teachers (MoPTA) - a high-stakes performance assessment of student teaching.

This policy brief chronicles the birth, adoption, and expiration of MoPTA and the educational policy dynamics that prevented the stable adoption of the assessment. We summarize our complete analysis which finds that MoPTA serves as an illustrative study for how teacher education policy delivery is formed and implemented within a network of interdependent actors. This analysis identifies logistical problems born from political culture valuing district autonomy. We find that divergent rationales for supporting high-stakes performance assessments, along with widespread concerns about the rigor and scoring of MoPTA, led to its abandonment. We suggest repairing and bridging communication between statewide actors for successful future policy implementation.