By Matthew Hornbeck

Journal of Staff Development, Summer 2003 (Vol. 24, No. 3)

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2003. All rights reserved.

The heart of improving school performance is investing in teachers through professional development. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act places an even greater premium on ensuring that classroom teachers are highly qualified. The challenge for states and districts is providing enough good professional development aimed at improving instruction in intensive ways. Providing literacy coaches for new teachers, for example, or helping senior teachers implement a stronger literacy program can cost more than district staff think they have to commit to professional development--especially in tight fiscal times like these.

But before districts try to find ways to invest more, a first step to building a better professional development strategy is to understand what the district currently spends on professional development. In an analysis of spending on professional development in seven large urban districts over the past five years, Karen Hawley Miles and I found the following:

Districts spend much more on professional development than they think, and most of it is neither actively managed nor explicitly linked to a district strategy.

Ask district leaders what they spend annually on staff learning, and they typically will point to the budget item for "professional development." Our analysis suggests that these estimates represent the tip of the iceberg. For example, one district reported spending $460,000 on "strategic professional development." An analysis showed the district spent nearly 20 times that amount--$9 million--to support teachers' and principals' professional learning. In reporting on professional development spending, most districts include only local dollars spent delivering courses and workshops, or they report only amounts managed by the official department for professional development. Typically, however, these resources are a fraction of available dollars. To take a more proactive, integrated approach, districts need to track and report:

• Professional development spending across all departments, all instructional initiatives, and all funds, including Title I, technology, and bilingual funds;
• Money dedicated to providing instruction-free days or other time for teacher professional development; and
• Money spent to pay teacher mentors and coaches, as well as tuition for coursework.

Districts spend more to buy teacher time for professional development than anything else, but there is little accountability for the use of this time.

In the seven districts studied, between one-third and one-half of professional development money was used to pay for professional development days or hours built into teacher work calendars, or for substitutes and stipends to free teachers for professional development activities. None of the districts, however, supported or required schools to develop integrated plans to use this time to improve school performance.

Without accountability for using this time wisely, some schools choose to have teachers meet across subjects and grade levels to discuss and plan instruction while others provide free time for teachers to grade papers or create bulletin boards.

Given the investment districts are making in providing teacher time, they need to make sure schools include the use of this time in their school improvement plans. In other words, the time for teachers to meet, plan, and learn as professional teams should be a resource that is clearly defined and integrated within the school improvement plan.

Heavy reliance on federal, special program, and private funds has contributed to fragmented professional development efforts and lack of long-range planning.

All districts rely heavily on external funds to support professional development, with a range of 40% to 60% of activities paid by external funds. Typically, Title I, Eisenhower, and technology funds are the biggest contributors, but IDEA funds, bilingual, and special state funds aimed at encouraging innovation also can contribute substantially.

Multiple funding streams contribute to the fragmentation of goals and delivery of professional development because the funds often come with restrictive or specific goals and activities. Many districts end up creating separate programs and infrastructures to support these funding streams.

Districts must move away from organizing activities around funding sources and combine funding streams to support integrated efforts aimed at school needs. Recent changes in federal funding regulations and new understandings and flexibility at the state level have created much more latitude for districts to combine funds to support consolidated and integrated instructional plans.

A few departments control the majority of district-level spending on professional development, but their efforts are often uncoordinated and inconsistent.

In one district, 30 different units or departments, other than the official department of professional development, administered professional development funds. Each of the seven districts studied had numerous departments and managers that managed spending on professional development.

Usually just a few departments control the majority of district level spending on professional development. Typically, these include the curriculum and instruction department, the official professional development unit, technology initiatives, Title I (or federal programs if there is not a separate Title I department), and lead teacher and mentor teaching programs. Often the departments providing the most money for professional development are not those officially charged with professional development.

Since each department's professional development activities evolve over time, the roles each department plays and the links between their activities are often unclear and uncoordinated. It is not necessary, or even possible, to group all professional development spending under a single department. However, it makes sense to require or encourage departments and managers conducting professional development activities to communicate with each other and demonstrate how their work is connected to the district's professional development strategy.

Sometimes large portions of spending are outside either district- or school-level control.

In one district we studied, one-quarter of the district's professional development spending is committed to a university partnership where the university largely determines the activities and use of dollars. In another, the union controlled more than half the money used to support courses for individual teachers. If these resources are managed as tight partnerships where goals are shared and the partner is explicitly accountable for meeting district goals, this can be a very effective way to deliver services. However, in many districts these types of partnerships and the substantial funds committed to them have become business as usual and protected sacred cows rather than creating dynamic and flexible programs that enhance district performance and support a strategic professional development plan for the district.

School-level resources for professional development vary dramatically across schools.

In each district, the distribution of school-level resources for professional development is not fully coordinated across schools, and some schools have access to relatively few sources of support. In one district, professional development resources in elementary schools vary from a low of $545 per teacher to more than $9,000 per teacher.

Some of these differences are driven by how aggressively principals and teachers allocate and seek funds for professional development on their own from the district and from other sources, such as foundations or federal funding streams. In other cases, the differences are driven by district decisions that determine which schools to include in selected programs where selection criteria vary.

Inventory and Analysis

It is important to clearly define and completely inventory spending on professional development across all departments and initiatives to better align it with instructional strategies aimed at student performance priorities.

Most educators and researchers include activities such as workshops, conferences, and the professional development department itself in their definition of professional development. A more comprehensive definition includes a wider range of investments aimed at building teacher capacity, such as mentoring, teacher sabbaticals, and individual coursework. Our analysis uses a broad definition of spending on professional development and includes all activities dedicated to increasing the knowledge and skills of teachers and school leaders, including substitute costs, stipends, and other teacher time costs. In this analysis, the definition is expanded even further to include how districts spend resources on intervention to support low-performing schools and school reform designs.

To create a common, consistent definition for what to include as professional development, districts must standardize how they look at spending. To accomplish this, districts must collect data on spending, activities, and organization to address these questions.

1. How much is the district spending on professional development, broadly defined?
2. What key initiatives are going to be counted as part of the inventory and analysis of professional development spending?
3. Who actually manages or controls the professional development resources?
4. What does current spending buy (stipends, substitutes, travel, registration, tuition, teacher time, expert consulting support, staff, materials)?
5. How is it funded (federal, state, local, union, or private sources)?
6. How is it delivered (professional development academy, external whole school model, school-based coaching, lead teachers, coursework, mentors, summer institute, etc.)?
7. Who is targeted to receive professional development (individuals, teams of subject-area or grade-level teachers, or whole schools)?
8. What is the purpose of the professional development (for individuals - induction, continuing education, remediation, or leadership) (for teams or schools - school restructuring, content support, support for special populations, etc.)?
9. What is the topic of the spending (literacy, math, science, etc.)?
10. What strategy or focus does the current professional development spending and activities imply?

Responding to these questions takes several steps. First, to fully understand the story behind the budget, analyze all district spending on professional development and gather detail on the target, purpose, and organization of the spending.

We start with the entire district operating budget in an electronic format and make certain to work with all sources of funds, including general or local funding, as well as all other public (state and federal) and private sources of funding. Many districts do not consider local, state, and federal funds together. Instead, there may be different budget staff who track and monitor state and federal spending and activities, and other staff who keep tabs on local funds.

With every budgeted line item and a legend for district-specific budget codes in hand, the next step is to exclude line items clearly unrelated to professional development. Some exclusions are spending on transportation, security, food services, and direct services to students such as teacher salaries (not to be confused with the teacher time spent of professional learning, which is included). Also, because the focus here is the district, we exclude school-level budgets and their professional development dollars (although in a few districts, we have conducted a companion school-level analysis to gain a fuller understanding of spending on professional development).

This "exclusion" approach contrasts with other approaches that look simply at what a committee or team thinks ought to be included in an inventory of professional development spending. We find that when districts brainstorm only what ought to be included, they invariably miss large sections of spending.

Once the lines that potentially could contain professional development expenses have been identified across all departments and initiatives, we code expenses by initiative, manager, source, topic, type, target, purpose, control, and other categories. The coding tool is standardized to enable a comparison of spending across districts, and it can be tailored to track and analyze spending in a specific area of interest to the district.

Careful coding allows us to generate tables and charts to stimulate discussion related to the above questions. For example, analysis can show preliminary information across departments and initiatives on the sources of total spending, the sources of spending on particular initiatives, whether funds are targeted primarily at individual teachers or whole schools, the purpose of specific spending, and other aspects that may help lead to a more comprehensive professional development spending strategy for the district.

Once the preliminary paper analysis is complete, we provide district-level department heads and managers the piece of the analysis related to their area and ask them to review what we identified as spending on professional development, check the coding for accuracy, and let us know if we missed budgeted items. Interviews typically include those in charge of the official professional development department, curriculum development, accountability and assessment, vocational education, special education, Title I and the former Title II federal programs, and any managers of private grants the district receives. We answer questions and help staff understand that the goal of the inventory and analysis is to help the district develop a more comprehensive professional development strategy.

A complete analysis that can form the basis of a districtwide professional development strategy usually takes several months and involves intensive departmental interviews to check coding, allocate staff salaries to appropriate activities, and identify the purpose, organization, and target of spending and activities. To get a fast look at district-level spending on professional development, use the tool available in the PDF version of this article.

Conclusion

In an era of higher standards and ever louder calls for accountability, some reformers envision states funneling dollars directly to schools and the state taking charge of schools that fail to improve, eliminating districts altogether. Others point out that especially in urban districts, most schools and teachers need help to close the daunting gap between the standards and current student performance. These reformers know that a school-by-school approach--rather than systemic district-level reforms--will not bring about widespread improvement. They see the district as a potentially powerful player in helping all schools reach higher standards.

About the Author

Matthew Hornbeck is a public education consultant. You can contact him at 39 Benezet St., Philadelphia, PA 19118, (215) 242-4891, fax (215) 248-6219, e-mail: matthornbeck@erols.com.