A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Designing Effective Development: Lessons from the Eisenhower Program - December 1999

Chapter 5

District Management of Eisenhower-Assisted Professional Development Activities

This chapter explores how districts manage and operate Eisenhower-assisted professional development activities. It also examines how key management, planning and implementation provisions of the Eisenhower legislation are associated with the quality of professional development activities, as defined by their structural and core features. The previous chapter described the tremendous variation across districts in their portfolios of Eisenhower-assisted activities—especially in their emphasis on traditional vs. reform methods of professional development, the duration of their activities, and the extent of collective participation and active learning opportunities of these activities. We also examined how districts select and target teachers to participate in Eisenhower-assisted activities. These features of district portfolios of Eisenhower-assisted activities are, in part, the cumulative result of districts' operation of Eisenhower-assisted activities.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by the Improving America's Schools Act (IASA) of 1994, contains a number of provisions about how districts should manage and operate Eisenhower-assisted professional development activities. First, several provisions of the law stipulate that Eisenhower funds should be an integral part of state and district strategies to transform education. The ESEA states that districts must use their Eisenhower funds to support professional development activities that are aligned with challenging state and local content and performance standards. Furthermore, the ESEA requires that district Eisenhower-assisted activities be coordinated with other sources of funding for professional development activities, as appropriate.

Second, a group of provisions in the legislation sets forth procedures that districts are to follow in order to achieve its ultimate goals of improved teacher practice and student performance. The ESEA incorporates the federal government?s emphasis on program performance and results. These procedures are grounded in a "continuous improvement" paradigm that has permeated all federal programs in recent years, spurred by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA). GPRA requires a process of strategic planning for federal agencies that includes developing goals and measurable objectives, describing how they would be achieved, and using evaluation data to track progress toward these objectives. Similarly, the ESEA requires that states and districts assess their progress in meeting Title II performance indicators.

A third set of requirements in the legislation focuses on planning Eisenhower-assisted professional development activities. Districts are required to work with teachers and other school-level staff in planning professional development activities. The law especially emphasizes involving staff in Title I schools in planning Eisenhower-assisted activities.

The common underpinning of all of these legislative provisions is the assumption that they will improve the quality of professional development offered by school districts. By including requirements about the operation of district programs, the legislation attempts to specify practices that presumably will contribute to high-quality professional development.

In giving districts a prominent role in operating and managing Eisenhower-assisted activities, the legislation is consistent with recent literature on school reform, which also emphasizes the critical role of school districts in setting the context for professional development activities (Elmore, 1996; Knapp et al., 1991; Spillane, 1996; Spillane & Jennings, 1997). However, very little is known about how districts plan or operate professional development activities, or about which district strategies for fostering high-quality professional development activities are effective. Much of the professional development literature focuses on the optimal characteristics of individual professional development activities, and not on district strategies for professional development.

Recent research focuses on the importance of school-based professional development that is embedded in the daily life of teachers (Corcoran, 1995; U.S. Department of Education, 1999a; Little, 1982; Loucks-Horsley et al., 1998). Yet, even when professional development occurs at the school, districts can play a central role in its planning and implementation. They also play a role in building a vision of school reform and shaping professional development to support reform efforts (Elmore & Burney, 1996). Districts, for example, may play a key role in conveying to administrators, teachers, and providers of professional development the implications of state and local standards and assessments for professional development activities, and how various sources of funding could be used to support these activities. Districts also may play a role in providing technical support to schools in tracking progress toward achieving professional development goals. Certainly districts can guide the use of Eisenhower funds toward school-based programs that are coherent (i.e., consistent with teachers? goals, aligned with state standards and assessments, and encouraging of continuing professional communication among teachers), a key attribute of quality identified in Chapter 3.

In the present chapter, we take a more in-depth look at the district?s role in shaping Eisenhower-assisted professional development activities. Specifically, we examine how districts address the alignment and coordination of the Eisenhower Professional Development Program with other programs; how districts implement "continuous improvement" based on indicators, needs assessments, evaluation, and guidance to schools and providers of professional development; and how districts involve teachers and other school staff in planning professional development efforts. Finally, we examine how all of these efforts are associated with the quality of Eisenhower-assisted professional development in the district. Exhibit 5.0 illustrates this chapter?s focus on these key aspects of the districts? operation of Eisenhower-activities in the context of the entire study.

EXHIBIT 5.0
Conceptual Framework for This Evaluation

Data Sources

The results presented in this chapter are based on data from our national survey of district Eisenhower coordinators as well as data from case studies of districts across the country. We conducted telephone interviews in the spring of 1998 with a national random sample of district Eisenhower coordinators. Through a process of stratified random sampling, selected to allow variation on size and poverty level, we targeted a total of 400 districts across the country. We obtained survey data from a sample of 363 district Eisenhower coordinators, yielding a response rate of 88 percent. During the telephone interviews, coordinators reported on specific professional development activities that occurred from July 1997 through December 1997; questions about general practices applied to the 1997-1998 school year. The probability of a district being chosen for our sample was proportional to district size (i.e., the number of teachers in the district). As a result, all of the data are weighted by district size. Therefore, our findings provide information according to the percent of teachers in a district.

Our case study information is drawn from two sources. One source is a series of 10 in-depth case studies that we conducted during the 1997-1998 school year. The 10 case study districts are a purposefully drawn sample of districts, two from each of five states. We selected sites to obtain variation on state-level reform efforts and the districts? approach to professional development, as well as demographic and geographic characteristics. We also draw on six exploratory case study districts that we visited at the end of the 1996-1997 school year; we selected these districts primarily for diversity of region, urban city, and ethnic composition. Appendix A contains detailed information about our methodology for sampling the National Profile, and Appendix B contains detailed information about our methodology for selecting case studies.^1,2

Organization of Chapter

This chapter is organized in six sections. The first three sections are organized according to the three main areas around which district roles revolve: 1) building a vision for education reform by aligning professional development with standards and assessments and coordinating with other programs; 2) implementing the vision for professional development through continuous improvement based on the use of objective data (through use of indicators, needs assessments and evaluations of Eisenhower-assisted activities), and the provision of guidance to schools and professional development providers; and 3) involving teachers in planning for professional development.

Throughout these three sections, for key management and implementation variables, we analyze and report whether there are statistically significant differences according to district poverty level or the number of teachers in the district (i.e., district size). For these analyses, poverty is divided into three levels—low (less than 10.9 percent of children in poverty), medium (10.9 to 21.4 percent of children in poverty) and high (greater than 21.4 percent of children in poverty).³ District size is divided into four types—small (less than 250 teachers), medium (between 250 and 1500 teachers), large (more than 1500 teachers), and consortia. A consortium is a group of districts, which can range in size from only a couple of districts to several hundred districts. To identify consortia, we asked each district that we sampled whether or not the district participated in the Eisenhower Professional Development Program through a consortium. If the district did participate through a consortium, we then drew the entire consortium into our sample, and adjusted the probability of each of the consortia being selected into the sample, based on the full set of districts that belonged to the consortium.

The size and poverty effects are each estimated where the other is held constant, so significant results for one dimension are independent of the other dimension. Interaction effects between size and poverty are not statistically significant unless otherwise noted. The fourth section of this chapter provides a summary and discussion of how districts vary in alignment, coordination, continuous improvement, and planning according to the district?s poverty level and size.

The fifth section of the chapter presents a model, based on our national data from district Eisenhower coordinators, of how district management and implementation practices influence the structural and core features of Eisenhower-assisted professional development activities. The sixth and final section summarizes our major findings and discusses implications for both federal and district policy.

³ These categories divide the population equally into thirds.
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[Chapter 4 Summary and Conclusions]

[Building a Vision for Professional Development]