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How does this figure compare to the average per teacher investment in professional development? In relative cost terms, institutes and retreats are an expensive venture; ongoing local study groups and after-school workshops are not. The average per teacher investment of direct monetary expenditures in California in 1985-86 (the only year for which such estimates are available) was approximately $900 (Little et al., 1987). That is, the total annual professional development of the average California teacher was subsidized by approximately $900 in public monies over a single fiscal year. A program that invites 25 teachers to a retreat for 5 days will invest more than one and a half times the resources per participant in 3-5 days than local districts typically invest in an entire year of a teacher's professional development.
The "average teacher" figure is, of course, something of a fiction; resources are not distributed uniformly. Experimental programs typically invest higher amounts in smaller cadres of teachers. The most prominent example in California at present is the California Mentor Teacher Program, which allocates approximately $6000 per year to each teacher selected as a mentor. The mentor program s per participant investment is thus nearly 7 times the average per teacher expenditure. (Two-thirds of that allocation goes directly to the teacher as a stipend; the remaining third is allocated to the district in support of the mentor s work). The program reflects an implicit policy wager: that concentrating resources on fewer than 5 percent of the state's teachers will yield benefit for the remaining 95 percent (see also Little, 1990b). The legislative intent attached to the mentor program outlines a set of obligations to beginning teachers, experienced teachers, and curriculum development; to the extent that mentors meet these obligations, they generate a "ripple effect" that lowers the per participant cost. That is, to the extent that the effects extend beyond those individuals who are the primary participants, the per teacher cost is appreciably lower than the per participant cost.
Investments beyond the ordinary (that is, narrow concentrations rather than broad distribution of resources) are more defensible if they can meet one of three criteria: (1) they can be credibly tied to a ripple effect (so that per teacher cost is demonstrably lower than per participant cost); (2) one can claim that the direct individual benefit of this specific program is far more certain than the benefit linked to conventional funding; or (3) the program contributes in demonstrable ways to increased organizational capacity in ways that transcend the impact on those individuals who participate directly in the "program."
The state and other players. When we consider levels of policy intervention and influence, we quickly find the state and the district to be the most prominent players in defining and promoting reform, and in sponsoring formal occasions of professional development. In the past decade, states have assumed greater prominence in shaping reform initiatives. This is not to say that state policy offers a coherent vision of the fit between teacher policy and various reform ventures (Little et al., 1987). Nor is it clear that state agencies and legislatures have given much consideration to the various possible forms that a state presence might take though in some of the more policy active states, such as Connecticut, Kentucky, California, and Oregon, the traditional impetus toward regulatory control is increasingly tempered by a role centered around the supplying information and incentives for local experimentation.
On the whole, however, states and districts have been relatively slow to reshape professional development in ways that respond to the complexities and ambiguities of reform. Much reform legislation reflects a tension between incentives and control, between provisions that expand teachers leadership opportunities (for example, California s mentor teacher program) and provisions that tighten external controls over teaching and teachers. (for example, new credentialing requirements or curriculum standards). On the whole, the incentives are attached to small, voluntary, and peripheral activities, while the controls embrace the entire teacher workforce and shape more central aspects of their work. In this asymmetry between support and control we may find some evidence of a pervasive skepticism among policy makers about teachers capacities and motivations, and thus a certain reservation about professional development strategies that measurably expand teachers collective autonomy.
Meanwhile, the responsibility and resources for teachers' professional development have for several decades (since the mid-sixties' federal social reform legislation) resided primarily with districts that is, with the employing organization. The shift to the school site brings control over resources closer to the classroom and increases the possibility that content and context might be more closely joined. Altogether, the profoundly local character of much reform activity would seem to offer substantial opportunity to create and support alternative modes of professional development those that enable local educators to do the hard work of reinventing schools and teaching. But there is no guarantee of that. If the established marketplace of training options fits poorly with the demands of reform, it nonetheless fits reasonably well with bureaucratic structures of accountability (by providing a record of participation ). If a menu of workshops fits poorly with the long-term vision and capacity required by genuine reform, it responds well to the short-term incentive structure and resource allocation scheme. Finally, staff development at the local level, despite the pervasive rhetoric of change, serves in large part as a vehicle of organizational maintenance-- a point worth remembering in the surge of interest toward reform (Schlechty and Whitford, 1983).
States and districts have emerged as the most visible and powerful players on the reform landscape. Less visible but potentially influential in achieving the fit between reform requirements and teachers' professional development are the various professional associations (teachers, administrators, other specialists, and school boards) and organizations representing business and industry. Foundations have been active in the support of various reform efforts, including those devoted to teachers' professional development, but it is only very recently that they have begun to join directly with states in pursuit of a reform agenda (Lagemann, 1992). Of particular interest and import is the increasingly powerful influence exerted by teachers subject matter associations (perhaps most prominently, NCTM) in shaping reforms in curriculum, assessment, and standards for teacher certification. Yet the place of subject matter associations in the lives and careers of teachers, and especially in preparing them to engage meaningfully and productively in reform, remains largely unexamined in the research and policy literature; recent case studies of the various mathematics collaboratives may signal a shift (Lord, 1991; Salmon-Cox and Briars, 1989). On the whole, however, available evidence suggests a weak connection between those subject associations and the main providers of professional development (the districts, private vendors, and universities).
The disposition of the unions toward these major reform initiatives and particularly any response they may have made in the form of teachers' professional development is largely undocumented. In interviews with union leaders in thirty California districts, conducted in 1986 (Little et al. 1987), we found that most locals concentrated on constraining administrators' access to teachers' time for purposes of school- or district-initiated staff development. We found no examples of a more affirmative or proactive involvement in substantive programs of teacher development although some promising exceptions have emerged since that study was completed, e.g., in the form of the policy trust agreement projects established in California (Koppich and Kerchner, 1990). Nor do we know much about the relative salience of the union compared to other sources in shaping teachers' response to or involvement in reform initiatives (Bascia, 1992). One is struck by some countervailing currents. First, the unions have responded to escalating pressure to balance a concern with personnel issues (compensation and other conditions of employment) with responsible attention to matters surrounding professional practice. Second, the unions have become more frequent and prominent players in shaping the reforms in teaching at the state or national level most often those having to do with the preparation and licensure of teachers. Their involvement at the local level is less clear, and certainly more uneven. Among the issues most germane to the major reforms discussed here are perceived constraints on teacher autonomy with regard to curriculum and instruction, and challenges to the deep-rooted egalitarianism of teachers that arise in various career ladder and mentorship schemes.
We thus have multiple players and multiple levels of policy and practice. Two major questions seem germane. First, what "fit" between reform and professional development is best achieved at each level or niche in the policy system, and through what policy mechanism? To what extent does policy making in each arena rely on regulation or persuasion? Second, in what ways and to what extent are the various policy orientations congruent or in conflict? For example, university faculty have maintained an avid interest in the development of state curriculum frameworks yet university admission requirements have also been said to exert a "chilling effect" on innovation in the K-12 curriculum (Grubb, personal communication, 1992). That is, colleges and universities may simultaneously foster and impede reform. At the local level, a district's interest in "comprehensive restructuring" may operate to displace small, vital pockets of initiative by teachers in individual schools.
Teachers central reasons and opportunities for professional development begin with the teaching assignments they acquire, the allocation of discretionary time, and other work conditions encountered day-by-day. They begin, that is, with a teacher's experience of what it is to teach and to be a teacher in general, and in particular circumstances. To some large degree, it is only in relation to the daily experience of teaching that one can anticipate the contributions of more structured opportunities that range from independent reading to formal coursework, conference attendance, skill training workshops, leaves or sabbaticals, participation in committees or special projects, and scheduled consultation with colleagues.
Reform movements tend to orient us toward an institutional (and largely functionalist) perspective. By this perspective, the schools' capacity for supporting the professional development of teachers is expressed in a system of obligations, opportunities, and rewards. Teachers obligations for professional preparation and development reside formally in certification and recertification requirements, teacher evaluation standards, and other personnel policies and practices. They are communicated informally by institutional norms regarding teachers performance.
In privileging the institutional and collective view, however, the language of reform underestimates the intricate ways in which individual and institutional lives are interwoven. It under-examines the points at which certain organizational interests of schools and occupational interests of teachers may collide. Critics of reform movements stress the tendency to "de-skill" teaching and a corresponding tendency to legitimate institutional surveillance and coercion under the rubric of "vision" and "instructional leadership" (Carlson, 1992; Hargreaves, 1992). Carlson (1992) describes the principled opposition mounted by a teachers' association to the "specter of standardization" they detected in basic skills reforms built around programmed materials, prearranged objectives, and batteries of standardized tests (p. 113). Smylie and Smart (1990), examining sources of support for and opposition to merit pay and career ladders, note that "the primary beliefs and assumptions that guide the development of relationships among teachers include norms of independence and professional equality" and it is naive to suppose that such programs will generate widespread support unless they resolve "social and normative incongruities" (p. 152, 153). Each of these cases is consistent with the observation that members of an occupational community may find that "what is deviant organizationally may be occupationally correct (and vice versa)" (Van Maanen and Barley, 1984, p. 291).
As the arena in which teaching traditions and reform imperatives confront one another most directly and concretely, the school workplace is both the most crucial and the most complex of domains in which we play out the possibilities for teachers' professional development. Teachers' motivations, incentives, and frustrations come foremost from the immediacy and complexity of the classroom: teachers' responses to the students they teach and the circumstances in which they teach them. Idiosyncratic classroom realities may take precedence over broader institutional interests, leading teachers to protect a "strategic" or "elective individualism" (Hargreaves, 1993; see also Flinders, 1988). The impetus to protect one's autonomy may be intensified by various circumstances surrounding collegial and institutional life the norms underlying peer acceptance and admiration, and the fabric of relations between teachers and administrators. The Academics and Coaches who make up the dominant cliques in Bruckerhoff's (1991) social studies department at Truman High express quite different teaching priorities, but they have in common their selective resistance to administrative pressures. Clearly, taking the workplace seriously requires more than shifting staff development resources and activities to the school site.
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[Conclusion]