New Report: Financing Teacher Professional Development

Posted by on December 12, 2003

[posted from Public Education Network newsblast]

DELIVERING, FINANCING & ASSESSING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Professional development, including both pre-service and in-service training, is a critical component of the nation?s effort to improve schools and student achievement. Key to ensuring that teachers, principals, and other educators have the knowledge and skills they need to meet the challenges of today?s classrooms is ensuring that they have access to sustained, intensive professional development. A new paper from The Finance Project examines how the financing of professional development directly affects what professional development takes place, how it is made available, who participates, who pays, and what impacts it has. In their view, improving professional development in education depends on better information about how cost-effective those investments are. With the goal
of concisely synthesizing a range of information not otherwise accessible in one place and disseminating it to the field, this paper examines what pre-service and in-service professional development is required and how it is delivered, financed, and assessed for teachers as well as principals and superintendents. While the status quo of how professional development is delivered around the country and efforts to measure its effectiveness can give a bleak picture when taken as a whole, this paper is in no way intended to condemn what all school systems are doing. To be sure, there are a significant number of districts, schools, and individuals who are doing it right. The focus of The Finance Project?s work in this area is to highlight promising practices and how they are financed, in order to provide models to others who need information to make positive changes.

http://www.financeprojectinfo.org/Publications/prof%20dev%2011-2-03.pdf