General Resources

This brief from Public Impact summarizes how states and districts that are overhauling their pay and career paths can give top teachers the opportunity to take on new roles and advance in their careers with sustainably funded higher pay, while reaching more students with their excellent instruction and developing peers on the job in teacher-led teams.

This brief from Public Impact shows how to calculate higher pay for teacher leaders and other teachers in “Opportunity Culture” school models while also funding time for teacher-led, on-the-job professional learning.

This self-assessment tool from ERS allows a school system to determine how well its practices align with the principles for effective professional growth and support. This resource is one of several in a series.

ERS created a detailed set of worksheets to enable school systems to better quantify their spending on teacher professional growth and support. This resource is one of several in a series.

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) conducted a small study of professional development spending in seven districts. The study found that districts rely heavily on unsustainable federal funding sources set to expire within a few years. Furthermore, school districts with higher concentrations of students in poverty tend to rely even more on unsustainable sources. 

This brief from Learning Forward argues that there is a pressing need for schools, districts, states, and vendors to change the way they allocate professional learning resources in order to meet Common Core State Standards. It recommends new investments for states, districts, and school leaders to consider, and includes a step-by-step process for selecting, procuring, implementing, and evaluating professional learning resources to meet the standards. 

This chart offers an overview of funding sources for teacher-led professional learning as well as a description of some broad and specific cost categories. Districts and schools will almost certainly need to tap several funding sources to design, pilot, implement, and sustain a well-developed teacher-led professional learning initiative. Those that want to fully and sustainably fund teacher-led professional learning can use this chart as a guide to considering how different funding sources might be used to support a range of professional learning activities.  

This short paper explains how schools using Multi-Classroom Leadership, a job model in an Opportunity Culture—which uses job redesign to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams, for more pay, within budget—can free funds and teachers’ time for on-the-job planning and development. 

Professional learning funding for individual schools often comes from “shared district resources,” a district-level funding source. This working paper says shared resources (which include a range of resources managed by the central office) typically go unreported in school budgets, despite representing a substantial portion of a school’s total resources. The authors propose a cost allocation model policymakers can use to better understand costs for individual items, such as professional learning, and how these funds are distributed among schools. 

This white paper from Education Resource Strategies (ERS) draws on research, experience, and detailed analyses of three case studies to describe several key steps for moving a school system toward a more strategic approach to teacher professional growth. This resource is one of several in a series.