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Remarks by Hayes Mizell on February 26, 2001 at a meeting of administrators from approximately 40 state education agencies. The education officials are persons with primary responsibilities for their agencies' administration of staff development programs. The meeting was sponsored by the National Staff Development Council and was held in Dallas, TX at the Doubletree Campbell Center hotel. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Professional Development:
The State It's In


What is a state to do? What is a state to do?

In response to rising public concern about the academic performance of students attending schools financed by state and local taxes, policymakers have enacted a host of laws and regulations to improve public education. They have mandated standards with the intention that teachers will align their curricula and instruction with what the state believes students should know and be able to do. They have mandated the frequent assessment of students to determine whether students are, in fact, making satisfactory progress towards performing at levels the state considers proficient.

The state policymakers have gone even further, allocating millions of tax dollars to develop and score tests that give teeth to the assessment mandates. Believing that in and of itself this testing means very little, states have used the test results to hold school systems, schools, and students accountable. They have created and used a wide range of sanctions when school systems, schools, and students fall short of the states' expectations.

Of course, it has been students-- people who do not vote or pay taxes or belong to professional associations with lobbyists-- who have borne the brunt of demands for accountability. Students who do not meet the states' standards for academic performance are retained in grade, or required to attend summer school, or scheduled into classes that last twice as long as regular classes.

This is not to say that teachers and administrators do not also experience the state's pressure. The academic performance of their schools' students is published in the local newspapers and posted on the Internet. A persistently low-performing school may be the ambivalent recipient of technical assistance from a team of educators organized by the state education agency. If the school's students continue to demonstrate unsatisfactory performance on the state test, its school system may reconstitute the school, providing it with a new principal and faculty, or may close the school altogether.

Some states even create escape hatches for students who attend a low performing school only because they are unlucky enough to reside in the school's attendance area. In these situations, parents may choose to enroll their children in another school with a more satisfactory record of student performance.

Policymakers missed two-thirds of the story

A decade ago, it would have difficult to imagine this range of state actions. They emerged because policymakers became frustrated with the cycle of school systems' excuses and promises about student performance, accompanied by only marginally improved results. Unfortunately, the policymakers focused on only one-third of the phenomena responsible for the schools' mediocre, or worse, record.

They understood that many teachers and administrators did not recognize the need to change their expectations, knowledge, skills, and behaviors to improve student performance, and that these educators demonstrated little interest and will in making the necessary changes in their professional practice.

What the policymakers did not understand was that, at the same time, their states and the federal government were also imposing a new expectation on educators and students, the expectation that all students -- not just "some" or "many" or "most"-- but all students should perform at basic and then at increasingly higher levels.

"All" means students who do not speak English when they come to school, or whose parents attained only a few years of formal education. "All" means students from low-income homes or perhaps have no homes. "All" means students who educators do not perceive to be motivated, gifted, or talented. "All" means students with extraordinary emotional and developmental needs.

This emerging expectation, whether explicit or implicit, was a new and radical challenge for educators, but most policymakers did not recognize it. They simply made laws and regulations assuming that the educators who would carry them out would do so with students who were little different from the policymakers' classmates decades ago.

The other phenomena the policymakers did not understand, or at least seldom acknowledged, was that teachers and administrators were woefully ill-prepared to meet the challenges of educating all students to perform at basic and then at higher levels. The policymakers assumed that educators could understand and implement new mandates, and change their practice accordingly, as fast as the policymakers could churn out the new directives. This was not and is not the case.

Teachers and administrators had the expectations, knowledge, skills, and behaviors to perform at levels that had passed for satisfactory in years past. They did not, however, know what to do or how to do it to enable all students to perform at basic and higher levels. In other words, policymakers focused on educators' reluctance to improve and created policies and allocated resources to force them to do so. But they did not appreciate the classroom realities confronting the educators charged with meeting the policymakers' expectations.

They did not address the teachers' and administrators' lack of capacity to either change or help all students perform at basic and higher levels. Even now, only a few states can point to notable success in significantly raising the performance levels not only of students, but of teachers and administrators as well. Only time will tell whether the combination of state-mandated assessments, accountability, and interventions will be powerful enough to increase significantly what students, teachers, and administrators know and can do.

How states might make professional development more effective

This bring us to today and our great opportunity and responsibility to make professional development as helpful and effective as it can be. As I have described it, much of education policy is more like hospitalization than like administering a vaccine. The role of staff development is not to treat the sick, but to prevent the illness of professional stagnation and crippling practice. Staff development can fulfill this role if states reflect on and learn from their own successes and failures in developing and implementing other policies to improve education.

I would like to suggest five courses of action that states might take:

First, states should focus on the relationship between professional development and student performance. Policymakers, school systems, and schools must understand that to achieve specific results in student performance, there must be staff development that educators specifically design and evaluate for the purpose of achieving those results. The tighter the links between the content and process of staff development and the desired performance of students, the more likely it is that educators' practice will produce results that benefit all students.

This is common sense, but judging from the professional development that some states fund, it is a concept foreign to many school systems and schools. The only remedy is to educate superintendents, principals, and teachers that the state values and insists on staff development that is for the specific purpose of increasing student performance, and that it is this staff development that will receive priority for state funding and approval of applications for federal funds the state administers.

Second, states should insist that school systems and schools document how state-funded professional development has or has not improved the day-to-day practice of teachers and administrators. Without such accountability, most educators will continue to regard staff development as an event rather than as a rippling sequence of activities and actions that intentionally culminate in the demonstrably improved performance of teachers and administrators. Changing the existing mental model for staff development will be difficult, but one way to do so is to require district and school leaders responsible for professional development to describe its effects on educators' practice.

Third, states should establish criteria for what constitutes effective, results-based staff development that merits state funding. The greatest obstacle that states face in increasing the knowledge and skills of educators is that most local administrators either do not know what high quality staff development is, or they do not apply what they know when it is time to make critical decisions that shape professional development. It is unlikely that the quality of staff development will improve unless local educators learn how to distinguish potentially effective professional development from that which is almost certainly misdirected and a waste of the state's resources.

For any state that wants to develop results-based staff development worthy of state funding, the experience and research base to do so already exists. All that is necessary is for states to understand that staff development is at the center, not at the periphery of school reform, and to act accordingly.

Fourth, states have to abandon policies and practices that have the effect of modeling or affirming ineffective staff development. When a state abruptly calls a meeting of local educators for a one-day training on some state or federal regulation, it communicates that a similar approach is appropriate for local school systems. The unintended message is that what really counts is authority and chain of command, not respect for the time and priorities of the training participants, not what is learned, and not whether the training helps the participants subsequently to apply what they learn. It is not surprising that practices of the state are reflected in the training that school districts sponsor.

And when states structure their professional development policies based on course credits or hours of participation, with little or no regard for what educators need to know and be able to do to increase student achievement, what does it say to local educators? It says that staff development is a hollow, mechanistic exercise that creates the illusion that professional growth is occurring, but with little expectation that either educators' practice or students' performance will improve as a result. No wonder that so much local staff development is an exercise completely divorced from what educators need to meet challenges in their classrooms.

If states are going to expect school systems and schools to take staff development seriously, states must lead the way by demonstrating what high quality professional development looks like in practice, and by developing practical policies that emphasize results rather than process.

Fifth, states have to know whether the staff development they fund is positively impacting gaps in student achievement. Does professional development increase the proportion of students who enter the middle grades with adequate computational and literacy skills? To what extent does staff development enable teachers at the middle level to address successfully the learning deficits of students who come to them performing one, two, three or more years behind grade level? Is professional development really enabling more teachers to help more students perform at standard? These are the kinds of questions states should be asking, and they should be funding researchers and evaluators to find the answers.

Staff development should be a lifeline to educators

These are just a few of the ways states can become more focused and aggressive in ensuring the integrity and effectiveness of staff development. Such steps are necessary because the quality of staff development is not inconsequential. It can be and should be a lifeline to educators who each day are facing great challenges in their classrooms and schools but do not know how to meet these challenges successfully. If states are not taking the initiative to ensure that staff development is an effective resource for teachers and administrators, states are part of the problem of unsatisfactory student performance rather than part of the solution.

There are people in this audience who are thinking that they do not have the authority or power to make these kinds of changes in their states' staff development. Maybe that is true. I do not know what power you have, but I do know that you are not without some authority and influence. The question is, what are you choosing to do with what you have?

This meeting provides the opportunity for you to consider new ways of bringing your leadership to bear on the great task of transforming staff development so it more directly contributes to the improvements in student performance your states are seeking. This meeting can be just one more professional gathering of little consequence. It can also be a new beginning for staff development in your states.

I hope you will make the most of this opportunity, learn from each other, and draw upon your collective insights and experience to forge a new vision for what professional development can and should be.

Thank you.