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

Endnotes

² Cohen, D. K. (1990). A revolution in one classroom: The case of Mrs. Oublier. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 12(3), 311-329; Elmore, R. F. & Burney, D. (1996, March). Staff development and instructional improvement: Community District 2, New York City. Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education; Elmore, R. F., Peterson, P. L., & McCarthey, S. J. (1996). Restructuring in the classroom: Teaching, learning, & school organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Grant, S. G., Peterson, P. L., & Shojgreen-Downer, A. (1996). Learning to teach mathematics in the context of systemic reform. American Educational Research Journal, 33(2), 502-541; Muncey, D. E., & McQuillan, P. J. (1996). Reform and resistance in schools and classrooms: An ethnographic view of the Coalition of Essential Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press; Sizer, T. R. (1992). Horace's school: Redesigning the American high school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

³ Cohen, D. K., McLaughlin, M. W., & Talbert, J. E. (Eds.). (1993). Teaching for understanding: Challenges for policy and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Darling-Hammond, L., & McLaughlin, M. W. (1995). Policies that support professional development in an era of reform. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(8), 597-604; Porter, A. C., & Brophy, J. E. (1988). Good teaching: Insights from the work of the Institute for Research on Teaching. Educational Leadership, 45(8), 75-84.

⁴ Corcoran, T. B., Shields, P. M., & Zucker, A. A. (1998, March). Evaluation of NSF's Statewide Systemic Initiatives (SSI) Program: The SSIs and professional development for teachers. Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.

⁵ National Commission on Teaching & America's Future. (1996, September). What matters most: Teaching for America's future. New York: Author.

⁶ U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (1999a). Teacher quality: A report on the preparation and qualifications of public school teachers (NCES 1999-080). Washington, DC: Author.

⁷ U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (1999a). Teacher quality: A report on the preparation and qualifications of public school teachers (NCES 1999-080). Washington, DC: Author.

⁸ Knapp, M. S., Zucker, A. A., Adelman, N. E., & St. John, M. (1991, February). The Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education Program: An enabling resource for reform (summary report). Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.

⁹ Part B allocates funds to the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the outlying areas.

¹⁰ Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended by the Improving America's Schools Act, is the federal government's largest investment in K-12 education. In FY 1997, Part A of the program, the local educational agency grants program, was appropriated at $6.27 billion. Most of these funds are distributed by formula, based on the number of children who live in poverty, first to states and then to districts. Established in 1965 as one of the cornerstones of President Johnson's War on Poverty, Title I funds educational services for children attending high-poverty schools. With its 1994 reauthorization of the program, Congress made clear its intention that services provided under Title I be linked to high state and local standards.

¹¹ Up to 5 percent of the SEA's Title II grant may be used for program administration, and another 5 percent may be used to support professional development activities provided at the state level.

¹² There are two ways that Eisenhower funds can be used to support professional development in other subject areas. First, when the appropriation for the program exceeds $250 million, the additional funds can be used to provide professional development in core subject areas other than mathematics and science. Second, the ESEA legislation allows states and districts to apply to the federal government for waivers that allow them to devote larger percentages of their Eisenhower Professional Development Program grants to other core subject areas.

¹³ The term "Eisenhower-assisted activities" reflects the fact that district Eisenhower funds can support professional development activities in a number of ways. Eisenhower funds may be used to support all costs associated with activities, provided that these activities are allowed in the legislation (see Section 2210). Alternatively Eisenhower funds may pay for only some of the allowable costs associated with an activity. This is a common occurrence, because the legislation encourages cost sharing of Eisenhower-assisted professional development activities with those funded by other programs (Section 2209).

¹⁴ This evaluation did not address ED's two performance indicators that address state-level operations of the Eisenhower program, or the performance indicator pertaining to alignment.

¹⁵ Our descriptions of the nature and quality of professional development provided through the Eisenhower program are based on national probability samples with excellent response rates. The national probability sample of district programs and SAHE grantees has an 88 percent response rate for district program coordinators and 87 percent for SAHE grantees. The national probability sample of teachers who participated in Eisenhower professional development activities has a response rate of 72 percent. The 72 percent response rate is especially high when considering the multistage process necessary to complete the sample. District coordinators and project directors in SAHE-grantee institutions had to submit the complete list of professional development activities provided during the prior year and the number of participants. Two activities were selected from each district with probability in proportion to size, and from those, complete rosters of teachers were collected from which two teachers were randomly selected and surveyed.

¹⁶ We also took a number of steps to maximize the validity and reliability of the evaluation's national survey data. For example, most of the survey questions ask teachers and administrators to provide an accounting of behaviors, not direct judgments of quality that might be more likely to be biased. The substantial variation in the responses teachers and district administrators provided to these behavioral items, as well as the consistency in teacher and district administrator responses, tends to bolster our confidence in the validity of the data.

¹⁷ See Carey, N., & Frechtling, J. (1997, March). Best practice in action: Follow-up survey on teacher enhancement programs. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation. Carey and Frechtling indicate that 44 percent of participants in outstanding teacher development programs reported that the programs enhanced their knowledge and understanding of science content to "a great extent" (value of 5 on their 5-point scale). If we isolate the percentage of participants in SAHE-grantee activities who reported that the activity enhanced their mathematics or science knowledge "to a great extent" (value of 5 on the 5-point scale), the percentage is 41 percent. The comparable percent for district activities is 24 percent.

¹⁸ Over the past decade, a considerable literature has emerged on professional development, teacher learning, and teacher change (Corcoran, T. B. (1995). Transforming professional development for teachers: A guide for state policymakers. Washington, DC: National Governors' Association; Darling-Hammond, L. (1995). Changing conceptions of teaching and teacher development. Teacher Education Quarterly, 22(4), 9-26; Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. G. (1992). Understanding teacher development. London: Cassell. Hiebert, J. (1999). Relationships between research and the NCTM standards. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 30(1), 3-19; Lieberman, A. (Ed.). (1996). Practices that support teacher development: Transforming conceptions of professional learning. In M. W. McLaughlin & I. Oberman (Eds.), Teacher learning: New policies, new practices. New York: Teachers College Press, 185-201; Little, J. W. (1993). Teachers' professional development in a climate of educational reform. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 15(2), 129-151; Loucks-Horsley, S., Hewson, P. W., Love, N., & Stiles, K. E. (1998). Designing professional development for teachers of science and mathematics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press; Richardson, V. (Ed.). (1994). Teacher change and the staff development process: A case in reading instruction. New York: Teachers College; Sparks, D., & Loucks-Horsley, S. (1989). Five models of staff development for teachers. Journal of Staff Development, 10(4), 40-57; Stiles, K., Loucks-Horsley, S., & Hewson, P. (1996, May). Principles of effective professional development for mathematics and science education: A synthesis of standards, NISE Brief (Vol. 1). Madison, WI: National Institutes for Science Education). The research literature contains a mix of large- and small-scale studies, including intensive case studies of classroom teaching, evaluations of programs designed to improve teaching and learning, and surveys of teachers about their pre-service and in-service preparation and in-service professional development experiences. In addition, there is a large literature describing "best practices" in professional development, drawing on expert experiences. Despite the size of the literature, however, relatively little systematic research has been conducted on the effects of professional development on improvements in teaching or on student outcomes, and very little has been conducted on the relative effects of alternative forms of professional development. The research that has been conducted, however, along with the experience of expert practitioners, does provide some preliminary guidance about the characteristics of high-quality professional development (See, in particular, Loucks-Horsley, S., Hewson, P. W., Love, N., & Stiles, K. E. (1998). Designing professional development for teachers of science and mathematics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press). In particular, several recent studies suggest that professional development that focuses on specific mathematics and science content and the ways students learn such content is especially helpful (Cohen, D. K., & Hill, H. C. (1998). Instructional policy and classroom performance: The mathematics reform in California (RR-39). Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education; Kennedy, M. M. (1998). Form and substance in in-service teacher education (Research monograph no. 13). Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation). We integrated and operationalized the ideas in the literature on "best practices" in professional development to create a set of measures or scales describing the six features of Eisenhower-assisted activities described in the text.

¹⁹ The 1988-99 evaluation collected data on duration from districts rather than teachers, so a comparison of results from the 1988-89 and the current evaluation should be interpreted as providing an indication of the general magnitude of the change rather than a precise numerical estimate. See Knapp, M. S., Zucker, A. A., Adelman, N. E., & St. John, M. (1991, February). The Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education Program: An enabling resource for reform (summary report). Menlo Park, CA: SRI International, p. 109.

²⁰ The Indicator requires that activities "are a component of professional development that extends over the school year." It is possible that some short-term Eisenhower activities are linked to other activities, and these "sequences" of activities extend over the school year. If so, the percent of Eisenhower-assisted activities extending more than six months may understate the percent of activities that "are a component of professional development that extends over the school year." On our teacher survey, we asked whether the Eisenhower-assisted activities were followed up with additional activities that built upon earlier work; 59 percent of teachers in district activities and 70 percent of teachers in SAHE-grantee activities reported that the Eisenhower-assisted activities in which they participated were followed up with additional activities. We have no information on the duration of the follow-up activities, but assumed that some of the follow-up activities might extend over the school year.

²¹ A "participation" is a teacher participant in an Eisenhower-assisted activity. Teachers who participate in more than one activity are counted separately for each activity in which they participate. The dollar per participation figure for districts includes federal Eisenhower dollars only and does not include the 33 percent matching requirement.

²² We were not able to conduct a systematic analysis of SAHE competitions.

²³ The data from our national sample of teachers show that each of these dimensions is related, either indirectly or directly, to improvements in teachers' knowledge and skills and changes in teaching practice; thus, we consider each of these dimensions as an indicator of high-quality professional development, whether it has a direct effect on teacher outcomes, or operates indirectly (e.g., a reform approach affects teacher outcomes indirectly through its effect on duration).

²⁴ We have no information on the scope of co-funding (e.g., the amount of money contributed by a particular program in a cost-sharing arrangement).

²⁵ Throughout our analyses of district data, we tested to see where patterns of Eisenhower support for professional development differ significantly according to the district poverty level or the size of the district. All of our analyses simultaneously control for size and poverty, so any effects are independent of one another. We also tested for the interaction between these two variables.

²⁶ Relative to SEAs, SAHEs have a smaller number of grantees, and thus may be able to monitor their grantees' projects to help ensure the implementation of quality activities. However, we did not examine the SAHE's monitoring role.
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[Implications for Professional Development]