Professional Development: The Why and How of Funding

The National Diffusion Network (NDN) has disseminated information on some types of programs and helped put schools in touch with training resources. Chapter 2 funds are often used for staff development, and the Eisenhower program provides staff development in math and science. For the first time, there is growing support for the idea of transforming Chapter 1 from a program primarily providing supplementary ("pull out" and "add on ) services to individual children of poverty to a means of motivating and supporting schoolwide change. This shift in focus began with the 1988 reauthorization, which expanded the opportunity for high poverty schools to implement schoolwide projects and changed accountability provisions to focus more on student outcomes. The discussions, proposals and arguments for redesigning Chapter 1, therefore, are enlightening for policy makers at all levels (local, state and federal) who are concerned with changing schools into more effective places of learning for all children. In this effort we see a growing recognition of the need for professional development as a necessary element of equity improvement.

The Commission on Chapter 1, chaired by David Hornbeck, has proposed a gradually increasing set aside of Chapter 1 funds for professional development, ultimately reaching at least 20%, with aprovision to assure that these funds not supplant current staff development efforts and funding. Additional funds were envisioned to build professional development capacity in the states and to pay for enhanced R & D programs for Chapter 1 schools. The Independent Review Panel of the National Assessment of Chapter 1, convened by the U.S. Department of Education and chaired by Phyllis McClure, made a similar set of proposals (U.S. Department of Education 1993a). The potential impact of these proposals could be profound·especially as they model cost effective restructuring for states, districts and schools with limited economic resources.

Why Should Categorical Funds Be Used To Support Professional Development?

The shift toward "whole school improvement," seen in changes introduced in the 1988 Hawkins Stafford Amendment and other developments in research and practice, continues as Chapter 1 programs increasingly focus on improving integration of Chapter 1 and regular classroom instruction and on improvements in curriculum and instruction. Schoolwide projects have increased rapidly, and program monitoring has shifted its focus more toward learning outcomes.

Despite these positive trends, Chapter 1 and other "categorical assistance" programs still affect only a small portion of students' school days (U.S. Department of Education 1993b). Student pullout from regular classrooms is still the most common structure, providing "special needs" students with 20 40 minutes each day of remedial instruction in reading, math, language, or English as a Second Language. Except in schoolwide projects, this typically has little effect on instruction in the regular classes of assisted children. The impact of improvement efforts would increase substantially if a portion of special assistance funds were devoted to improving the curriculum, instructional practices, classroom management skills, assessment practices, and other skills of the regular classroom teachers with whom students spend most of their day, and were used for schoolwide improvements in organization, professional development, curriculum, and parent involvement. The use of categorical funds to hire additional personnel is a common practice. Teacher aides, for example, may free a teacher's time for planning, increased individual attention to underachieving students, or necessary paperwork. However, given the existing need for teachers more adequately trained to teach diverse students, one may question whether using at least a portion of categorical funds for ongoing professional development might not be more effective in improving the regular classroom learning opportunities of poor and diverse students. For example, in an elementary school of 500 students and 20 teachers, the cost of one aide (roughly $20,000 in salary and benefits) could instead fund a professional development program with a budget of $1,000 per teacher/per year. That would be enough to provide consultation, training, follow up, materials, release time and other development services beyond what most teachers receive. Professional development is especially important as schools make major shifts in curriculum and instruction to respond to new national goals and new state assessments.

How Should Professional Development Funds Be Used?

The funds set aside by states and local education agencies for professional development could be used for a broad range of purposes directly related to improving the education of at risk student s. This could include the following:

• Consultation to help school staffs explore alternative courses of action to improve curriculum and instruction. Research on schools implementing various programs has found that school staffs have rarely considered a range of alternatives or consulted with teachers before settling on a given option. Yet a process of examining alternatives in light of the school's needs and resources would be valuable·not only in producing a better match, but also in increasing the school staffs commitment to a course of action they have carefully considered. To facilitate this process, schools might devote funds to hire consultants who are aware of a broad range of options that a school might consider and who are skilled in helping school staffs organize themselves to prepare for reform (e.g., forming committees to investigate various programs, services, and materials for potential adoption), clarify their philosophies, needs, and resources, and develop staff vision and cohesiveness. These consultants should be aware not only of a wide variety of programs and materials from which schools might choose, but also of the research done to evaluate each, and should be able to help school staffs select approaches that promote racial, ethnic and gender equity. After a school staff has decided on a direction and is implementing its plan, the consultant~might work with school staff to help them adapt innovations to their needs. a key step in adoption of externally developed models (Crandall 1982; McLaughlin 1990).

• Training in specific models of instruction, school organization, parent involvement, family support, and so on. When school staffs have decided how they want to proceed, they would decide to invest in training, follow up, materials, release time for training and planning, and other costs. These could be costs of adopting specific innovations, such as Reading Recovery (Pinnell 1989), general school organization plans, such as the School Development Program (Comer 1988) or Success For All (Slavin, Madden, Karweit, Dolan, and Wasik 1992), or to help staff develop home grown approaches to curriculum, instruction, or school organization. Schools might choose to ask the staff of effective schools in their area to help them implement new strategies. Schools might ed in rigorous studies. Federal and state agencies might be asked to prepare and continually update guides to effective programs for use in the planning process.

• Release time is the key to success of professional development·not only for participating in training, but also for common planning, peer coaching and other means of ensuring staff empowerment for high quality implementation of new methods. Time for professional development has always been scarce, yet research on effective staff development shows the need for extensive opportunities for teachers to engage in collaborative planning, peer coaching, and other activities. Professional development funds should be available to release teachers in schools implementing major changes to participate in such activities on a routine basis (Purnell and Hill 1992; Showers, Joyce, and Bennett 1987; Wilson 1993).

• Professional staff to work directly with teachers to implement new methods. One important lesson of research on the Success For AU program (Slavin et al. 1992) is the importance of having a full time facilitator in each school to help teachers implement the many changes inherent in the program. Facilitators visit teachers' classes to give them feedback on their lessons, organize meetings among teachers for joint planning and problem solving, manage an internal assessment system to make sure that all students are making adequate progress, and ensure that all staff members working with the same children are in communication with each other. For comprehensive schoolwide innovations like Success For AU, such facilitators are essential. For less ambitious innovations, district level "circuit riders," who rotate among several schools using a given method or program, can be effective. This is a typical arrangement, for example, to support broad scale use of cooperative learning within a district.

• Materials and supplies to enable school staff to implement improved curricula and instruction. These could include student materials, teachers' manuals, videos, software and other materials and supplies clearly beyond those (such as textbooks and paper) typically present in schools. However, some sort of limitation must be placed on the proportion of the funds that could be used for this purpose. The danger is that schools might, for example, define "computer assisted instruction" as the innovation they are implementing and then primarily purchase hardware and software. Funds should be devoted primarily to professional development, not expensive materials.

School Control Over Staff Development Resources

Schools should largely control their professional development dollars. Ideally, school staff should be able to choose from among effective programs, adapt and/or develop their own, and select trainers and materials. They should be encouraged to pool funds with other schools, for example, to bring in a trainer or workshop program that would be appropriate for multiple schools. In practice, it is likely that the LEA would take a major role in determining how schools spend their staff development resources, since the district does have ultimate authority over its schools. However, practices should strengthen the role of the individual school in deciding on its own needs.

State departments, LEAs, intermediate units, universities, lighthouse schools and other organizations will all be expected to develop capacity to support innovation in schools, but the schools should have the freedom to make their own selections of consultants, programs, and being saddled with ineffective or inappropriate services; good programs will grow and poor ones will fade, regardless of who sponsors them. This should help build professional development capacity in each state and region, but not compel schools to use any particular service.

Serious long term staff development is so rare in American education that existing capacity for supporting it is inadequate. Therefore, the Chapter 1 Commission has proposed that funds be provided to SEAs to help them build capacity within their states to support innovation. This could mean establishing state or regional Chapter 1 Improvement Centers; working out ways to identify and certify school change experts who would work with schools to help them decide what changes they should be making and make them aware of training or materials to support innovation; identifying highly effective and innovative schools whose staff is willing to work with other schools; or contracting with universities or innovative LEAs to help with school change. However, as noted earlier, the fact that SEAs build capacity to support innovation in no way implies that schools must use their services.

Research and Development in Support of Professional Development

The professional staff development processes discussed above can be helpful in moving schools toward more effective practices and should help to achieve the high standards embodied in the new national goals and emphasized in all of the commission reports. But, by themselves, they beg the critical question: "What works?" What instructional methods, curricular approaches, materials, staff development methods, school organization plans and other alterable features of school and classroom practice make a positive difference in student achievement and other outcomes?

Our current knowledge base relating to effective practice is totally inadequate. Good research on some elements of effective practice is swamped by false claims and slick marketing. Lacking the training to evaluate research findings critically and lacking the time and resources to sift through the research in any case, most educators give up on trying to figure out what really works and instead rely on what's "in." The result is rampant faddism, with educators rushing from one untested miracle to another.

The federal involvement in R & D on effective programs has been minimal. For example, Chapter 1/Title I has spent millions on evaluation but $0.00 to support development, assessment and diffusion of programs and practices designed to enhance student achievement. The Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) rarely funds program development. One indication of this is that, although a substantial portion of OERI Research and Development money goes to labs and centers, the National Diffusion Network (NDN) list of effective programs contains only a handful of programs (out of more than 500) developed by labs or centers. The NDN is supposed to certify and then help disseminate effective programs, but its evaluation requirements are minimal and its funding to help disseminate its programs has been tiny (Klein 1992). Ideally, professional development dollars should be restricted to programs that rigorous research has shown to be effective. Unfortunately, today such a restriction would limit schools to choosing from a small set of programs (Slavin, KaIweit, and Madden 1989).

Research that focuses on effective practices is badly needed and should be funded. We need actual programs (e.g., reading programs like Reading Recovery, and school organization plans like Leavens or Comer's models), as well as information on how to integrate classroom and supportive services, how to organize peer coaching to support the adoption of an innovation, how to incorporate multicultural perspectives in curriculum and instruction, how to use discovery in mathematics or reciprocal teaching in reading, and how to identify other variables that make teaching more or less effective. Since educators usually modify and adapt new methods, research suggesting the kinds of adaptations that might improve or limit innovations would be important.

Second, third party evaluations of promising programs and practices should be conducted. An important element of an overall research and development plan, this is totally lacking today. Third party evaluators would negotiate measures, designs, and procedures with developers and researchers, and would then conduct top quality evaluations, comparing the achievement of students who experienced a given program or practice to similar students in run of the mill models. Developers would know the objectives to be assessed but not the items. Programs and practices chosen to be evaluated would be ones whose developers had already done their own successful evaluations.

The outcome of these third party evaluations would be a set of programs and practices capable of significantly enhancing student achievement (if properly implemented). Most importantly, adopters could have faith in the evaluations and, therefore, in the programs. This would help them feel better able to invest in high quality staff development, follow up and maintenance needed to implement the programs and continue them over time. The third party evaluations would give education something like the FDA, which is essential in giving physicians and patients confidence in medications and medical procedures. Until we have trustworthy third party evaluations, fads will continue.

Certifying better mousetraps in no way guarantees their use. Developers and researchers will need funding to take their ideas from the pilot stage to a form that can be disseminated. This means funding for video tapes, awareness and training manuals, building of regional training sites and "lighthouse" model schools for use in a comprehensive training plan. Research and development activities should be funded in such a way that if developers of effective approaches choose not to disseminate them, the funding agency could contract with someone else to do so. Effective programs must get off the shelf and into the classroom, whatever this takes.

Support is needed to build the research and development infrastructure. Predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships for talented young researchers to get into research and development relating to critical educational needs should be funded. Especially critical is the need to attract women and minority students into this area of research. At present, few talented students choose educational research as a profession, and fewer still choose applied research in schools serving disadvantaged students. This must change if research and development is to become a key focus of quality education.

Finally, schools need to be aware of the range of proven and promising programs. Part of the overall research and development plan should be commissioning of summaries of research on effective practices and reports on important findings. The Department of Education might fund a research journal and a practitioner oriented newsletter to communicate new developments in Chapter 1. Reports may also be written for parents and community members, disseminating information at a readable level so that it does not stay in the research community.

The net effect of the research and development proposed by the Hornbeck Commission would be revolutionary but essential. If Chapter 1 is to demand the use of the best practices with Chapter 1 students, someone must know what best practices are and they must be used for the benefit of all students. This focus can help move educational innovation from faddism to science, and it can help build the infrastructure of educational research and development.

Conclusion

The opportunities for systemic reform in American education have never been as great as they are today. Yet, if systemic reform is to result in classroom change, it must emphasize professional development and research and development (R&D). Changing standards, assessments, curriculum frameworks and regulations create a climate conducive to positive change, but fundamental change in classroom practices must be built teacher by teacher, school by school. A practicing teacher is not likely to change how she or he teaches reading or math because of edicts from Washington or Austin; she and her colleagues will do so only when they are encouraged and expected to choose from among effective programs and are given the resources and time needed to learn new methods and adapt them to their own needs and resources. In the past, the federal role has dominated the direction of educational reform; today, energized leadership must come from the state and local level.