The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) seeks, among its guiding principles, to "improve student achievement" by increasing "teacher effectiveness." Studies have begun to document that one of the most significant levers for enhancing teacher effectiveness, with even greater impact than adjusting teacher salaries or lowering student/teacher ratios, is professional development. Making systemic changes to professional development serves as a strategic use of ARRA funds.
Professional development may in fact be the best long-term investment a district can make with its stimulus infusion. PD can fulfill all three of DMC's objectives of student achievement, operational efficiency, and financial savings, while simultaneously utilizing stimulus funds in a one-time fashion that does not risk a "funding cliff." Given the long-range reward professional development promises for a reasonable expenditure, districts should view PD not as a "luxury good" that can be afforded only in prosperous times, but instead as a durable project that merits current consideration.
The theme of professional development in districts thus far has been fragmentation, which has produced a lack of resource coordination and accountability. Professional development content, delivery systems, and course duration and frequency are typically evaluated only with participant feedback. A more revealing analysis of the efficacy of professional development would integrate financial, human resource, and student achievement measurements.
Comprehensive and rigorous professional development rests at the intersection of a variety of data systems within the school district, including Finance/ERP, Human Resource (HRIS), and Student Information (SIS) systems. The ability to analyze the value of student achievement gains recorded in an SIS against the costs of professional development documented in ERP systems and the statistics of PD participation tracked in an HRIS will generate significant data about the effectiveness of various subjects and methods of professional development.
Since DMC's original work proposing an integrated PD system in 2005, other research projects have centered on the same themes of synthesis and centralization. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, for example, recently released a report, Human Capital Management: A New Approach for Districts, advocating that districts establish a coordinated and strategic PD office. Similarly, the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement has called for PD to be more closely linked to district goals and student achievement.
The management of PD financing poses significant challenges to districts today. The sources of professional development funding vary widely. While state and local governments have traditionally been the primary funding source, some school districts rely heavily on federal dollars as well as private contributions to support a substantial portion of their professional development activities.
The costs that consume these funding sources also exhibit great diversity. A narrow definition of the costs of professional development may include only training and coaching and conference fees, but an expansive view that more accurately reflects total costs would also take into account travel and transportation, teacher time, substitute teachers, administrative costs, tuition reimbursement, and salary credits for professional development.
Aggregating the many sources and components of funding renders a drastically changed picture. An average public school district spends between three and four percent of its operating budget on conventional professional development, which translates to between $12 and $16 billion in annual expenditures nationwide. But taking a wider view suggests that the real cost of professional development is closer to $40 billion a year. DMC recommends investing in a discrete effort to understand the full picture of PD spending, as well as establishing systems and tracking to understand costs and participation over time.
Despite the significant investment being made by districts, however, little consensus exists about the most effective approach to professional development. The offerings cover a wide spectrum of content-curriculum and performance standards, integration of educational technology, new methods of teaching, in-depth study of subject matter, encouraging parental and community involvement, classroom management, addressing the needs of students from different cultural backgrounds-and avenues of delivery-case studies, independent projects, networking, coaching, study groups, university courses, team planning, training, mentoring, curriculum development, and workshops. Because of the lack of proven methods, most teachers participate every year in a diverse array of professional development offerings.
Nor is there any one authority to bring greater consistency to the field. In a typical urban school district, over 20 different departments may be responsible for professional development spending. The professional development department itself may account for only a small fraction of the total spending.
More rigorous and targeted assessment would, in turn, would allow districts to better connect training to the classroom experience by following professional development sessions with school administration support, additional training, and teacher collaboration.
Reform should come sequentially in the areas of cost, organization, and tracking.
First, districts should get a handle on the intricate web of funding by synthesizing the collective costs. A framework for analyzing costs should incorporate at least the six direct, and ideally some indirect, costs incurred in connection with teacher learning.
Second, as aggregating costs yields a more holistic view of the state of professional development, districts should think about integrating these resources. A formal professional development department, through which federal, state, and local funds flowed, could eliminate redundant administrative infrastructure and staff and shape a more uniform set of priorities and strategies. As the Human Capital Management report from the Annenberg Institute also noted, such a consolidated professional development department would be able to look beyond the transactional aspects of human resources to encompass the strategic area of linking professional development to classroom instruction.
Dade County Schools in Florida has centralized the management of all PD efforts district-wide to facilitate closer management of service delivery and measurement of training efficacy. Another example, Christina, Delaware, has instituted a streamlined professional development management structure as part of a major reform effort. The overall professional development committee has instructional and non-instructional components that then break down by school type or operational department. Within this management structure, training occurs through a defined process of identifying and analyzing a performance gap, designing, developing, and implementing a solution, and evaluating improved job performance.
Finally, the synthesis of costs and the integration of resources should provide a foundation for more thorough analytical measurement. A comprehensive approach to professional development allows for a platform of technological assessment. Houston ISD, for example, built its own internal professional development tracking system. Other districts are in early stages of investing in tracking systems that use not only traditional survey data, but also student achievement, to inform professional development and align training with the actual needs of individual students and teachers. The expanded data warehouse makes possible a data-driven professional development process that follows content delivery with online learning, mentoring, coaching, remote support, and lesson study.
With synthesis, integration, and analysis, districts should be able to broaden their toolkit of best practices.
The tracking that has occurred so far has already generated some significant insights. For one, responses from teachers affirm that in-depth study of their main teaching subject area has the greatest impact of professional development programs on classroom teaching. 71% of public school teachers stated that in-depth study improved teaching at least moderately, if not by a lot. Districts may therefore want to rationalize their highly varied professional development offerings into a few, high-impact activities.
"They're offering me stress reduction workshops when I need to learn how to help students meet new standards. My stress comes from not having the tools to help my students succeed!"-New York Public School Teacher
Within the high-impact activities, more frequent participation is, according to teachers, more effective. Consequently, traditional "one-shot" workshop and in-service days may have more limited success in improving teacher practices than professional development options of longer duration. Paradoxically, though public schools spend more on professional development as a percentage of their payroll than most private sector industries, they fall on the lower end of annual training hours per employee. Public school employees average only 23 hours of training per year. In comparison, staff members in the transportation sector receive an average of 49 hours of training per year. Given the possible benefits of longer training sessions, districts should try to extract more hours of training from their considerable investments.
Of course, districts must try to augment the duration of professional development activities while simultaneously limiting incremental district expenditures and minimizing the loss of classroom hours. Some ways of freeing up time for professional development, such as adding more professional development sessions to teachers' contracts or hiring more core teachers, carry a high incremental cost. Others, such as scheduling students in non-core activities or inserting additional early release and late arrival days, impinge appreciably on students' instructional time.
Teacher collaboration is an effective and efficient medium to expand professional development opportunities while containing the implications for cost and classroom time. By reorganizing school schedules and school staffing, districts can maximize the occasion for teacher collaboration. Depending on a district's preferences and logistics, the collaboration can take a variety of forms, from common lesson planning and teacher networking to in-house consulting services and professional development laboratories.
Teacher collaboration can serve as the culmination of the professional development process. It can solidify the content of training sessions by providing a context to incorporate job-like skill practice, facilitate project teams, support the capture of informal knowledge, and foster mentoring.
Ultimately, the key to each best practice is to integrate it into an evaluation of the efficacy of professional development. By gaining a fuller view of PD costs, more closely tracking PD participation, and linking costs and participation to student achievement, districts can design an efficient system that will deliver financial, operational, and academic benefits far into the future.
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education; National Commission for Teaching and America's Future; National Staff Development Council; Education Commission of the United States; North Central Regional Education Laboratory.
North Central Regional Education Laboratory; Finance Project; New American Schools.
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.
Ibid; National Center for Training and Development.
Richard Elmore, 1999; Westchester Institute for Human Services Research; The Finance Project; National Commission for Teaching and America's Future; Consortium for Policy Research in Education; American Productivity and Quality Center; Chief Learning Officer; COHERE.
Pay-for-Performance Programs: Strategies, Structures, and Funding
By Nicholas P. Morgan & Daniel Schiff
