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 6

Characteristics of IHE/NPO Recipients of Eisenhower Grants

Section Findings

• A little less than half of the teachers participating in SAHE-grantee projects are in projects in research or doctoral-granting universities. A little more than half are in projects in other types of institutions those that grant bachelor?s and master?s degrees only, private liberal arts institutions, and public two-year colleges.

• Nearly half of the participating teachers are in IHEs whose Eisenhower projects are affiliated with mathematics or science departments, but almost as many are in IHEs whose Eisenhower projects are affiliated with education departments. The majority of participating teachers are in projects whose Eisenhower projects are headed by tenured professors, and almost two-thirds are in projects that have received Eisenhower support for four years or more.

• Approximately one-third of the participating teachers are in projects that provide one or two activities, one-third are in projects that provide three to ten activities, and one-third are in projects that provide more than 10 activities. A little less than half of the participating teachers are in projects that provide only one or two types of activities.

Eighty-six of our total sample of project directors are from IHEs; six are from NPOs. To develop a detailed view of the characteristics of SAHE grants in IHEs, we asked a series of questions of each project director about the type of college or university the director works in, and the department, school, or center with which the director is affiliated. We also asked each director to describe his or her position (e.g., tenured professor, adjunct professor).

As Exhibit 6.1 shows, results from our survey of SAHE-sponsored IHE Eisenhower project directors indicate that about a third (34 percent) of teachers participating in IHE Eisenhower-assisted activities are in IHEs that offer only bachelor?s or master?s degrees, about two-fifths (44 percent) of participating teachers are in IHEs at either research or doctoral-granting universities, and less than a quarter (22 percent) are in private liberal arts and public two-year universities.⁸

EXHIBIT 6.1
Characteristics of SAHE Grantees

Each IHE project director also reported the department, school, or center with which he or she is affiliated. As Exhibit 6.1 shows, more than a third (39 percent) of teachers participating in SAHE-sponsored IHE projects are in projects affiliated with the education school or department; 24 and 23 percent are in projects affiliated with the science and mathematics department, respectively; and 13 percent are in projects affiliated with other departments or schools. Examples of other departments or schools that project directors are affiliated with are departments of broadcasting services, general studies, language and literature, and parallel studies; a college of business; a group of academic administrators; and a university outreach organization.

Each project director also indicated which position he or she held. Exhibit 6.1 shows that the majority of participating teachers (56 percent) are in projects whose directors report being tenured professors; 17 percent are in projects whose directors are deans or department heads (who, in most cases, also is a tenured professor); seven percent are in projects whose directors are part of the staff of a research center; and only one percent are in projects whose directors report being adjunct professors. The remaining 20 percent of participating teachers are in projects whose directors report holding positions other than one of these four, but do not describe the position.

We also asked IHE project directors how long they have been receiving Eisenhower funds, not limited to the project we asked them about on the survey. As Exhibit 6.1 shows, nearly half (48 percent) of the participating teachers are in projects that have received Eisenhower support for more than five years; ten percent are in projects that have received support from the Eisenhower program for between four and five years; and 29 percent are in projects that have received Eisenhower grants for between one and three years. Eight percent of participating teachers are in projects that have received Eisenhower funds for less than one year, and only one percent are in projects that have received Eisenhower support for less than a year.

The NPOs in our sample represent several different types of organizations. As indicated in Exhibit 6.1, one NPO is a professional association, two are media organizations, one is a consortium of several city school divisions, one is a private nonprofit environmental organization, and one is a regional nonprofit educational institution. Three of the NPOs have received money from the Eisenhower program for between one and three years, two have received Eisenhower funds for between four and five years, and one of the NPOs in our study has received Eisenhower funds for less than one year.

To get a sense of the types and scope of activities that SAHE grantees provide, we asked project directors to describe the types of activities that they provide (e.g., workshops, conferences, courses, networks, and internships), the number of activities that they provide each year, and how many teachers are served by each activity (data not shown).⁹ Their responses indicate that SAHE-grantees vary in the number of activities that they provide. Almost a third of participating teachers are in SAHE-grantee projects that provide only one or two activities per year: specifically, 21 percent of participating teachers are in projects that provide only one activity, and 10 percent are in projects that provide two activities. Seventeen percent of participating teachers are in projects that provide three to five activities, 16 percent are in projects that provide six to ten activities, 16 percent are in projects that provide 11 to 15 activities, and 21 percent are in projects that provide 16 or more activities. Similarly, some SAHE grantees support only a few types of activities while others support several types. Thirty-nine percent of participating teachers are in projects that support only one type of activity, eight percent are in projects that support two types, four percent are in projects that support three types, 21 percent are in projects that support four types, and 29 percent are in projects that support five or more types of activities.

The median number of teachers that SAHE grantees serve is 33 teachers (data not shown). More specifically, 31 percent of participating teachers are in SAHE-grantee projects that serve 25 teachers or fewer, 29 percent are in projects that serve 26 to 50 teachers, 13 percent are in projects that serve 51 to 100 teachers, 10 percent are in projects that serve 101 to 200 teachers, nine percent are in projects that serve 200 to 500 teachers, and three percent are in projects that serve more than 500 teachers.

These results indicate that, on average, professional development sponsored by SAHEs are projects in IHEs; are housed in education, mathematics, or science departments; are in institutions most likely to grant teaching degrees; directed by tenured professors who themselves or whose institutions have a history of several years of working with the Eisenhower program; and are focused on a few types of activities for a small number of teachers. This contrasts with the professional development provided by districts, as reported in Chapters 4 and 5; districts tend to provide portfolios of a diverse set of activities, while SAHE grantees typically support one focused, small-scale project. We now move on to discuss the structural characteristics of the professional development activities that SAHE grantees provide.

⁹ Information about the number of teachers served by the SAHE grantees is an approximation. We had two sources of information about the number of teachers served ? data from professional development activity lists that we collected from SAHE-grantee project directors and data from our telephone surveys with SAHE-grantee project directors. In many cases, these data did not match exactly. We averaged the two sources of data together and used this number as our estimate of the number of teachers served by each SAHE-sponsored IHE or NPO project.

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[Chapter 6 - State Agency for Higher Education Grantees]

[Structural Features of SAHE-Grantee-Provided Professional Development]