Wondering where the Blue Ribbon K-12 panel could find the money to raise South Dakota teacher salaries? How about cutting professional development activities?
Last week The New Teacher Project issued “The Mirage,” a report on the programs schools offer to help teachers improve their professional skills. TNTP studied three large public school districts and one medium-sized charter school system. Whether their results extrapolate to South Dakota’s mostly small school districts is an open question. But TNTP found those districts’ professional development activities appear to have no connection with helping teachers teach better:
Despite searching exhaustively, we found no evidence that any particular format or amount of professional development consistently helps teachers improve. Even when individual teachers improve substantially—and we found examples of teachers who improved measurably in 95 percent of the schools we studied—we found no common threads that distinguish them from teachers who do not. Unsettling though this is, it’s consistent with prior research: In the last decade, two federally funded experimental studies of sustained, content-focused and job-embedded professional development have found that these interventions did not result in long-lasting, significant changes in teacher practice or student outcomes [Dan Weisberg, “Do We Know How Teachers Get Better?” TNTP Blog, 2015.08.04].
These findings reinforce my anecdotal experience: in full-time employment in four South Dakota public school districts over the last twenty years, I have never walked out of a professional development activity feeling better equipped to teach.
If all those in-service days and motivational speakers and group activities aren’t boosting teacher performance, why not get rid of them and redirect that money toward teacher salaries? Handing teachers bigger paychecks may boost their morale and performance more than professional development activities.
But how much money is in the professional development pot? TNTP found its studied districts spending beaucoup bucks on professional development:
School systems are making a massive and laudable investment in teacher improvement. The districts we studied spend an average of $18,000 per teacher, per year on development efforts. Based on that figure, we estimate that the largest 50 school districts in the country spend at least $8 billion on teacher development every year. And teachers devote nearly 10 percent of a typical school year to development activities.
$18,000 per teacher—really? I glance at the Aberdeen K-12 budget and find three budget lines for staff development in FY 2015 totaling $97,781. Divide that by about 270 instructional staff, and Aberdeen appears to be spending $360 per teacher on staff development.
TNTP derives its $18,000 figure from a complicated methodology that looks beyond budget line items and included “evaluation systems, time and resources that indirectly support teachers at the central office and school levels, additional time teachers reported spending on coaching and peer observations, and investments in teachers’ salaries for degree attainment” [“The Mirage,” p. 10]. TNTP says 77% to 87% of that $18,000 is “related to teacher and staff time and salaries”—i.e., money that’s already paying teachers, but just going for naught in professional development activities with no measurable positive impact.
87% of $18,000 would leave $2,340 in professional development costs that could be extra money that we could get by canceling professional development and add to teachers’ paychecks. That’s still 6.5 times more money than the $360 per teacher I can find explicitly budgeted for professional development in Aberdeen’s budget and thus 6.5 times more than I could probably convince the business manager, board, and taxpayers we could save in real dollars by cutting professional development activities. But whether the professional development fat in the budget is $360 per teacher or $2,340 per teacher, neither of those amounts would be enough to raise South Dakota’s average teacher pay to regionally competitive levels.
Besides, TNTP itself thinks cutting professional development activities would be a disaster:
Those who would take our findings as evidence of “wasteful” spending or as an argument for drastically cutting support for teachers miss the point. Improving teacher effectiveness at scale—so that the vast majority of teachers master core instructional skills and students learn in rich, engaging and rigorous classroom environments—is critical to the long-term success of our education system and worthy of a substantial investment of time, attention and dollars. In fact, the CMO [charter management organization] we studied spends substantially more than the districts on teacher development, but they also see many more teachers improving their practice substantially. Summarily cutting supports to teachers would be a disaster; it would result in massive disruption, low morale and high attrition of top-performing teachers [“The Mirage,” p. 34].
TNTP declines to offer any easy template for effective teacher development. Teachers learn and grow in different ways, just like students. Effective professional development thus requires a variety of programs and interventions, founded on clear organizational goals and metrics. But more individualized professional development based on more rigorously measured performance would require more spending, not less. TNTP’s findings alert us toward the need to improve professional development, but the discovery that current professional development isn’t worth measurably diddly does not mark the spot where we can find the hidden treasure chest to raise teacher pay.
Maybe related this just hit NPR:
http://kuow.org/post/100000-day-washington-state-fined-over-mccleary-education-case
Cory H: “I have never walked out of a professional development activity feeling better equipped to teach.”
NEVER? Cory, that is one of the more surprising things I have heard you say. It’s been my anecdotal experience that even poor speakers can teach us SOMETHING over the course of a presentation.
Is someone with the state government suggesting that we are having too many in-services in a year? If so, the solution is simple. Stop mandating that we have so many in-services! We had several in-services just for the new teacher evaluation system this last year. Otherwise, we would not have had them. If anyone wants to cut in-service days in favor of more school days, 99% of all teachers will gleefully comply. Yes, in-services are generally quite ineffective in altering teacher practices or outcomes. However, summer workshops and programs can be quite valuable. These do induce changes and improvements in the classroom because they cater to a specific content area and are applicable to that specific teacher.
Brian, I mean it. It’s not so much a matter of poor speakers (although I’ve got darned low tolerance for bad speakers and BS artists in any setting, including teacher development sessions) as poorly used time. Every hour I’ve spent an in-school in-service activity could have been better spent in reading a good book, studying my content material, planning lessons, or working with students. Even if we converted every in-service hour to regular classroom time, I’d suggest there’s more chance for teacher improvement through practice (heck, make it observed practice! bring in admins and colleagues to observe and critique!).
I will grant that “never” is a strong word. Roll tape of every session I’ve attended, and perhaps we could find one little nugget that would make me say, “Oh, yeah, that was interesting and useful.” But we don’t formulate policy on nuggets; we seek practices that produce clear, regular, everyday results. If I’m a dull teacher, I don’t get to keep my job by having one kid come in and say, “Yeah, Heidelberger’s class was mostly a waste of time, but I did learn a couple verbs that one day when we played Jeopardy.” That seems to be the point of the TNTP report: there may be nuggets in current professional development practices, but they can’t find any reliable sign of improvement from overall practices.
spencer-like the NOAA experience which had to be a gas (from my own time on the sea), and i am sure benefited your pro-development and your students as well? Congrats
In South Dakota, there was a time when teachers took a major role in providing professional development. The SDEA organized and held the annual institutes which kept teachers abreast of the developments in pedagogy and knowledge. Bill Janklow and then SDEA president Diana Miller conspired to take that professional responsibility away from teachers and put it in the hands of the government bureaucracy.
One of the most successful professional development programs was the National Writing Project, which had its extension in this state as the Dakota Writing Project. Originally, it had as a principle that development did not come from alleged experts who delivered their particular shtick and then left never to appear again. Instead the Project was organized to provide teachers a chance to exchange information and ideas among themselves, to coach and support each other, and to develop themselves in the skills they were imparting to students. NSU, BHSU, and DSU collaborated on the project, and Bill Proctor, Jim Swanson, Stu Bellman, and I literally operated it out of the trunks of our cars, until we got some grant money from the National Project and the Bush Foundation. Its successes were measurable and got the full support of its many participants and the regents. It embraced teachers from K through graduate school.
The flaw in the Project was that at some point it was expected to be absorbed into the system and supported locally. As that happened, one of the first principles to be eliminated was that one about not relying on outside experts. We had the project working in many schools, but administrator were not supported. One school was so successful that it gained national attention until that high school introduced merit pay which demolished the collaborative attitude needed for peer-driven professional development. In other systems, the administrations would not schedule times for the teachers to do the necessary collaborative work. The Project was headquartered at NSU until the college president appropriated funds generated by the Project and shifted it to other uses. He resented the fact that the project was teacher-run and was independent of the educational bureaucracy. Slowly, the Project was demolished by the lack of funding, but more by the administrative resentment against teachers having charge of their own profession.
Spencer makes a very good point about the nature of in-service days. If all we’re doing is learning about new state mandates, we aren’t improving real teacher performance; we’re just learning what boxes to check to keep our schools’ fat out of the fire.
Spencer’s comment seems to flow naturally into David’s observation on how real teacher-driven development activities have been squeezed out of the schools for political (in the bad sense of the word) reasons. David indicates a disturbing trend of taking away teachers’ autonomy in their own professional development and bringing to heel at the feet of the bureaucracy. As Frank Bruni observed in an article David shared with us under another thread, autonomy is right up there with good pay as a factor in keeping teachers in the profession… because when you’re taking orders from someone else all day, it’s not a profession; it’s just a job.
What grade are you teaching this year, Mr. H?
I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to professional development days. I would agree with David that the best come when it is teacher driven and often teacher led. In the past few years we have focused a few on breakout session to allow teachers to focus where they feel that they can benefit the most. The Common Core hoops and all the other hoops put a big grind on what teachers can actually accomplish in training days.
I don’t want them to go away. I just want them to become better.
By the way Mr. Newquist, I took part in the DWP at USD about 8 years ago. I enjoyed the training and came away with several new ideas that were implemented in my English class. The biggest benefit of any session is not the person standing in front of you talking, it is the collaboration with other professionals.
MJL affirms what David is saying about the difference between hoop-jumping and real professional development. Common Core doesn’t improve teachers’ skills; it just codifies for administrative purposes the good work teachers are already doing. Teachers want to gain new professional skills, not new clerical skills.