A new study of 10,000 teachers found that professional development — the teacher workshops and training that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year — is largely a waste:
Researchers examined three large school districts as well as one network of charter schools. They looked at professional development programs at all the schools and teacher performance data over several years, and they surveyed 10,000 teachers and interviewed more than 100 administrators. They identified teachers who improved their job performance and tried to figure out what experiences they had that differed from teachers who were stagnant. To determine if a teacher had improved, researchers analyzed multiple measures — evaluation ratings, classroom observation and student test scores.
And they didn’t find many answers.
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The school districts that participated in the study spent an average of $18,000 per teacher annually on professional development. Based on that figure, TNTP estimates that the 50 largest school districts spend an estimated $8 billion on teacher development annually. That is far larger than previous estimates.
And teachers spend a good deal of time in training, the study found. The 10,000 teachers surveyed were in training an average of 19 school days a year, or almost 10 percent of a typical school year, according to TNTP.
You either know the subject or you don’t. If you can diagram a sentence or understand axioms and theorems, you can probably teach it.
If you don’t know, the professional development ain’t gonna help.
Of course they’re a waste — for teachers! But they’re not intended for teachers. For the politically well-connected leftists who get brought in to run these sessions, they’re a meal ticket and a chance to inflict leftism to a captive audience. And that’s their real function.
Have you seen this? Roland Fryer: Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination
These are the lecture slides.
The best single statistic: if you adjust for 8th-grade test scores, wage inequality between whites and blacks in America drops from 28% to 0.6%.
He covers many factors that do not help in education, masters degrees being one of them.
Most importantly he covers some ground on what has been found to work.