Case Studies: Overview | Boston | Chicago | Cincinnati | Philadelphia
Any system that places teaching quality at the heart of its reform will require significant investment in professional development to support teachers in their effort to improve instructional practice. While districts often devote significant resources to professional development, the efforts are often uncoordinated and do not add up to a coherent whole that targets a district's most important priorities. A professional development strategic review compiles and codes all current investments and practices to create a full picture of professional development investments. Armed with this information, leaders can make informed decisions about redirecting monies to more aligned strategies and leveraging funds for additional investments.
Districts rarely create system-wide multi-year strategy for professional development, making most efforts fragmented and uncoordinated. To worsen matters, existing funds are often spent on strategies that have not been shown to increase student learning. For example, though districts invest heavily in education salary increments, research has found little evidence that additional coursework or attainment of general masters degrees have a positive impact on student achievement.
Though much remains to be learned about the characteristics of high-quality professional development, there is growing consensus that professional development is more effective when it is team-based, job-embedded, driven by teachers, and sustained over time. This new vision of professional development will require a significant investment over the long-term, making it essential for districts to undergo a strategic review of spending and practices. This will allow officials to:
- Evaluate current investment levels. When districts define professional development narrowly, it results in a perception of low spending on professional development. This perception gets in the way of thinking big about what is possible. A strategic review will give districts a realistic account of their current investment in professional development.
- Understand the target and purpose of activities. A strategic review will map current investments onto priorities to help districts understand the target and purpose of professional development activities.
- Develop a professional development strategy. With a better understanding of current spending, districts can realign investment with educational priorities and make informed decisions about which practices will make the best use of limited funds.
Without a system-wide strategy, professional development spreads scarce resources thinly across many priorities or misses critical areas of need entirely. Further, many different central office departments often administer professional development funds. While each has a legitimate purpose for providing professional development around their expertise, in the absence of an overall system strategy, different and sometimes conflicting strategies may compete for resources.
Districts need to develop a professional development strategy that directs scarce resources to the most important priorities. In so doing, they should keep the following recommendations in mind. These recommendations are drawn primarily from the research of Education Resource Strategies, Inc. (ERS). ERS has worked extensively with urban public school systems to strategically rethink the use of district and school-level resources. For examples of how ERS has implemented these recommendations in practice, visit the Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago pages.
- Define student, teacher, principal, and school need. Developing a strategic professional development plan requires a clear understanding of student, teacher, principal, and school need. Districts need to collect accurate information on student performance and teacher and principal effectiveness. This information can then be used to help identify priority areas for improvement. For more information on setting up systems to collect such information, visit the integrated assessment page, the teacher evaluation page, and the administrator evaluation page.
- Build a shared vision. Districts need to build a shared vision of professional development priorities. This coherent strategy should align with best practices identified in emerging research on successful support systems. All relevant stakeholders must be invested in this new vision and involved throughout the strategic review process. This means that they should have a clear understanding of how improved professional development will lead to increased student learning.
- Map and measure current level of investment. Before districts can begin to create a new strategic professional development strategy, they must first identify their current level of investment. It is essential to collect additional evidence from a variety of sources such as in-depth interviews and working sessions with district personnel. The mapping process should be guided by the following five questions: (1) How much is the district spending on professional development? (2) What does the current spending buy? (3) Who controls and manages how the dollars are spent? (4) How is the professional development funded? and (5) How is spending allocated across schools? An inventory of all professional development activities can be completed and categorized using the ERS coding tool.
- Track investment along critical career junctures. Laying out investment along all major career transition points - induction, continuing education, recertification and remediation - allows districts to understand how they are prioritizing these critical career junctures. With limited resources available, it is a far more effective strategy for districts to concentrate investments in areas of high need. For more information on professional development for teachers early in their career, refer to the Mentoring and Induction page, and for struggling teachers, refer to the Peer Assistance and Review page.
- Base decisions on capacity and understanding of conditions. When considering proposed initiatives, districts may want to differentiate professional development support based on (1) school performance and (2) teacher and leadership capacity. High performing schools with effective leaders may benefit from more flexibility and autonomy in implementing professional development that is aligned to their individual needs. On the other hand, low performing schools without capacity may require more technical assistance from the central office or other external support.
- Funding Student Learning: How to Align Education Resources with Student Learning Goals
(Jacob E. Adams, Jr., Center on Reinventing Public Education, October 2008)
The School Finance Redesign Project based out of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) formed a National Working Group on Funding Student Learning composed of leading experts in the field. This report compiles these experts' opinions on the problems with state school finance systems and discusses approaches to education finance that will help achieve new learning goals. The report details how to integrate resources and learning through continuous improvement, how teachers, principals, and superintendents manage resources for continuous improvement, how elected officials and departments of education support continuous improvement, and how to transform finance systems to support ambitious student learning goals. Key ingredients in the recipe for fixing broken school finance systems are: (1) allow dollars to follow students to their schools; (2) integrate resource decisions with instructional plans; measure and analyze results of different expenditures; (3) actively support continuous student improvement; (4) define and fund a research and development agenda that expands what we know about effective resource use; (5) make resource use and academic achievement central to financial reporting practices; and (6) use funding contingencies to create fair and meaningful accountability. - Inside the Black Box of School District Spending on Professional Development: Lessons from Comparing Five Urban School Districts
(Karen Hawley Miles, et al., Consortium for Policy Research in Education, September 2003)
This report is based on work done in five large urban districts to create a standard way of defining the components of professional development, describing their purpose and organization, and tracking their cost. Researchers discovered that (1) districts invested significant, but widely varying resources in professional development, (2) districts underestimated their total spending and did not always explicitly account for certain costs such as contracted time for professional development, (3) most districts targeted the majority of professional development spending toward school level capacity building, but none had formal strategies for coordinating or integrating these investments, (4) districts used common strategies for professional development but in very different mixes, and (5) districts relied on external sources of funding for almost half of all professional development provided. - Reinvesting in Teachers: Aligning District Professional Development Spending to Support a Comprehensive School Reform Strategy
(Karen Hawley Miles and Matthew Hornbeck, New American Schools, 2000)
This article explores options for rethinking how best to support teachers and schools in meeting higher standards. The authors provide the following recommendations: (1) define professional development principles and a strategy for effective professional development that revolves around support for schools implementing comprehensive school reform; (2) align the professional development resources with district academic goals and focus spending on a few topics; (3) re-examine the professional development activities of each major department involved to link these activities to the district's student performance goals and to school-level efforts to implement comprehensive school reform designs; (4) create more accountability for the quality of professional development plans and make their review a central part of the planning, budgeting, and evaluation processes; and (5) create a consolidated plan for the integration of external funds to support the professional development strategy. - Summary and Reflections on 14 Years of CPRE School Finance Redesign Research
(Allan Odden, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, June 2004)
This brief outlines how the Consortium for Policy Research in Education has approached the school finance agenda over the past decade and a half and describes the research that has been produced thus far. Among other topics, the author discusses how to collect school-based fiscal data and better report educational expenditures, highlights the costs of whole school redesign, offers guidance on determining adequate levels of funding, and presents strategies for restructuring professional development to boost student achievement. - The Big Picture
(Karen Hawley Miles, JSD 24, no. 3, Summer 2003, 34-37)
This article discusses the importance of developing a good professional development strategy and provides districts with four questions to consider: (1) what resources are involved in professional development; (2) what are the district's student performance priorities; (3) who needs support; and (4) what kind of professional development is most likely to improve student performance. It also outlines the characteristics of high performing schools, presents principles of effective professional development, and offers recommendations for designing a strategic professional development system.
The following websites and tools are categorized by the work of four organizations - Education Resource Strategies, the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, and the Annenberg Institute. These organizations provide districts with information about how to assess current resource allocation for professional development and offer recommendations for how to utilize resources more effectively.
Education Resource Strategies, Inc. (ERS) works with school districts to bridge research and practice by supporting clients with diagnostic analysis tailored to their district, web-based tools, research and training, and actionable strategies. The ERS research room catalogs reports in five practice areas: Professional Development and School Support, School Funding Systems, School Level Resource Use School Performance Management, and School System Design.
- DREAM - District ResourcE Allocation Modeler. This web-based coding tool allows users to identify key school system cost drivers and budget levers and experiment with specific design decisions around improved performance to see their budgetary impact. DREAM combines research and practice by translating three guiding principles into specific school improvement choices, such as school-based professional development, common planning time, and small group support. By quantifying the financial trade-offs and budget impact of such programs, and combining them with specific district data, DREAM allows users to highlight areas with the greatest potential for improvement and identify the resources required to get there. DREAM Tool.
The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement
The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement ("The Center") is a U.S. Department of Education-funded nonprofit education research and consulting organization that works with clients to implement practices that improve teaching and learning. The Center assists schools and school districts engaged in reform by providing them with reliable information about research-based strategies to guide their reform efforts. The Center's mission is to help schools organize, plan, implement and sustain improvement.
- The School Review Process Guide is designed to assist schools in planning and implementing a school improvement process focused on increasing student achievement. The guide provides school improvement team members with a flexible planning and implementation design that can be tailored to individual schools.
- The Reallocating Resources for School Improvement Guide provides written and audio tips from experts in the field of reallocating school and district resources. Contributors not only explain the context of resource reallocation at the school and district level, but they also discuss challenges of budgeting school improvement as well as provide examples of districts and schools that have overcome these barriers with good leadership and decision-making. The guide discusses key principles for allocating resources.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) engages in independent research and policy analysis on a range of K-12 public education reform issues, including finance and productivity. Using evidence from the field of education as well as experience working in other sectors, CRPE offers innovative and practical solutions for policy makers, elected officials, parents, educators, and community leaders for some of the most pressing issues in education today.
- The School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) was created by CRPE in 2003 to help elected officials better understand how the finance system now works and to identify strategic ways to reallocate resources. Since its inception, SFRP has produced more than 30 studies.
The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University develops, shares, and acts on knowledge to improve both the conditions and outcomes of schooling for all students.
- Assessing Patterns of Resource Distribution (APRD) is a free online tool developed by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform designed to help identify inequities in school budgets across schools within a district.
- The School-Improvement Guide describes a school self-study cycle to help build collaborative inquiry, discussion and data-driven decision-making to fuel continuous improvement. This tool could be used by state- or district-level administrators to apply a consistent approach in all schools or by school-level administrators undertaking their own improvement process.
- Doubling Student Performance … And Finding the Resources to Do It
(Allan R. Odden and Sarah J. Archibald, Corwin Press, 2009)
Odden and Archibald describe the strategies dozens of districts and schools around the country have used to produce dramatic improvements in student learning (what the book terms doubling performance), the programmatic efforts behind those efforts and their resource needs, and ways resources can be found to fund those programs, including resource reallocation. The ideas and suggestions in the book could guide strategic budget cuts as well as strategic use of any new resources. The final chapter also shows how all the resources needed can be included in restructured state school finance structures designed to link state funding to ways schools and districts can boost student learning. - Reallocating Resources: How to Boost Student Achievement Without Asking for More
(Allan R. Odden and Sarah J. Archibald, Corwin Press, 2000)
Although there has been receptivity to the notion of school-level resource reallocation, there has been a dearth of information on how resource reallocation can actually be implemented. The authors' goal is to describe actual resource reallocation practices and the realities of the resource reallocation process using examples from the schools that they have studied, as well as schools that others have studied. Though it is helpful to know that resource reallocation is feasible, it is even more helpful to principals and teachers to understand the nitty-gritty details of it - which resources get reduced, which resources are added, what funding sources are tapped, what problems are encountered, and how the process unfolds in real school settings. - The Strategic School: Making the Most of People, Time and Money
(Karen Hawley Miles and Stephen Frank, Corwin Press, 2008)
Exploring the link between purposeful resource allocation and academic achievement, Karen Hawley Miles and Stephen Frank demonstrate how educational leaders can develop successful and strategic schools by assessing how well they use all available resources - people, time, and money - and by creating effective alternatives to meet goals. The authors use their extensive research with urban schools and districts to present case studies of schools that successfully reorganized resources to implement the "Big 3 Guiding Resource Strategies" - improving teaching quality, creating individual attention, and maximizing academic time. The Strategic School offers planning guides, checklists, worksheets, and strategies to help leaders assess current resource use, organize resources, craft a master schedule, and connect resource allocation to student and school performance.