Excerpts from inside the Black Box School District Spending on Professional Development in Education: Lessons from Five Urban Districts

Autor/inn/en	Miles, Karen Hawley; Odden, Allan; Fermanich, Mark; Archibald, Sarah
Institution	Finance Project, Washington, DC.
Titel	Excerpts from inside the Black Box School District Spending on Professional Development in Education: Lessons from Five Urban Districts
Quelle	(2005), (18 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Monographie
Schlagwörter	Leitfaden; Return on Investment; School District Spending; Professional Development
Abstract	As districts struggle to meet the demands of standards-based reform and requirements for "highly qualified" teachers in the face of increasing fiscal constraints, professional development has the potential to be a significant part of a district's improvement strategy. To use dollars effectively, districts need to think about how to best integrate professional development expenditures and activities with their overall strategies to improve student performance. To develop and implement a coherent professional development strategy that maximizes their return on investment and is aligned with district goals, districts need to understand how much they spend, what activities those funds support, how the activities align with district goals, and how flexible resources are. This article, originally published as an academic article in the "Journal of Education Finance" v30 n1 p1-26 Sum 2004, represents a collaboration of some of the most knowledgeable education finance researchers about professional development spending in the country. The article sets forth a concrete, powerful tool that helps districts quantify and analyze their professional development spending and discusses the results of its application in a number of districts. This tool not only illuminates where funds are being spent, but also systematically categorizes the purposes of the spending, prompting district leaders to think strategically about targeting resources purposefully to align with the districts' needs and goals. Going beyond broad and sometimes misleading budget categories and the limited sources most districts consider when tallying professional development investments, this tool looks broadly to capture spending on efforts to build instructional capacity and considers the range of resources under district control. With this kind of information in hand, policymakers and education leaders could organize their district support to make the investments matter for students. [Preface by The Finance Project.] (ERIC).
Anmerkungen	Finance Project
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10