Is Professional Development for Teachers One Big Boondoggle?
A study raising a lot of eyebrows in the education world this week suggests that, despite the billions of dollars we are pouring into teacher development every year, we have very little to show for the expenditure. The report, released by the education-reform organization TNTP, puts a shockingly high price tag on professional development, which refers to the ongoing, on-the-job pedagogical training, both formal and informal, that teachers receive throughout their careers: The unnamed three large school districts and medium-size charter network it examined spent, on average, $18,000 per teacher for training that spanned 19 days, or roughly one-tenth of the school year. All that cash and time, for what TNTP found to be questionable outcomes at best. Among the roughly 10,000 teachers surveyed, teacher evaluations found that only 3 out of 10 teachers improved while 2 out of 10 got worse over two or three years.
While some teachers did improve (as measured, among other metrics, by students’ proficiency in math and reading and classroom observations), many others “plateau before they master core instructional skills.” And even in the best-case scenarios of teachers who “did grow substantially over time,” the study could identify “no clear patterns in these success stories and no evidence that they were the result of deliberate, systemic efforts.” There was no clear correlation between the type of training they received, or the number of hours they’d received it, and any discernible improvement. Basically, nobody knows what works, so districts just throw different teacher-development techniques (and lots of dollars) at the wall and hope something sticks. Instead of this haphazard approach, TNTP recommends that districts set clear, measurable goals, then constantly try to determine the best methods of achieving them. But how exactly do we do this? Anyone who dips even momentarily into the ferocious debate over “value-added” teacher evaluations understands that the evaluative process used to measure such goals is by its nature subjective and ever-shifting, its effectiveness and accuracy open to great debate.
And because the study emphatically found no concrete strategies that reliably improved teacher performance, TNTP’s recommendations struck this reader as more amorphous gobbledygook. “Give teachers a clear, deep understanding of their own performance and progress,” the report suggested, and “encourage improvement with meaningful rewards and consequences,” and “reconstruct the teacher’s job.” What exactly does any of that mean—and what is a better, in-plain-English path forward?
Ann Neary, who has taught English at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx for 10 years, told me that the first thing that struck her about the study is the organizationProfessional development for teachers: New study questions value of teacher training.:
