In the United States, we usually think of school districts as independent entities without much need for outside support. While most of the funding for district operation comes from a largely external, state-determined, blend of local and state sources, there is an assumption that, given the funding, the school district is fairly self-sufficient. America’s education system developed with that assumption of school district self-reliance, but I believe that assumption is not correct and severely limits potential positive development in the overall education system.
About two-thirds of the more than 13,000 school districts in the U.S are in rural areas or towns. Additionally, only about one-fifth of U.S school districts have more than 1,000 students. Those two facts are helpful for sustaining strong local engagement, local ownership in the district, and usually creating a community of support for students. In spite of these advantages, many observers will point out that there are many duplicative business operations such as payroll and purchasing in these multiple small districts. While those inefficiencies might be concerning, the major problem with small school districts is the severe lack of capacity in human resource management.
For example, how can a typical school district be proficient in hiring principals if they only have to do it once every five years? How sophisticated is their network for recruiting, hiring and mentoring new teachers? Perhaps most importantly, where is the capacity to provide for the continued development of professional staff? The school board may assume that sending the superintendent to a national meeting at least every other year is all that is required for her continued development, but that compares very poorly to the investment private sector business makes in continued development of executives in comparable sized organizations. There is a similar failure to understand what it takes to provide for the continued development of teachers and principals. In most districts, the available development opportunities are inadequate for the sustained improvement of teaching and learning.
Until the last few decades, school districts were almost entirely dependent on higher education to provide the coursework that served as the assumed basis for educators’ professional development. More recently, much of the responsibility for staff development and training in many states has been taken up by “educational services agencies” that operate at a regional level.
So, the status today is that, with the exception of very large districts, most of the professional development is outsourced and much of it is provided to meet states’ generic requirement for credits toward licensure renewal of teachers and principals. In most cases, professional development offerings are not based on the well-articulated, specific needs of a school district. In many cases, the staff development offerings can be accessed in a piecemeal way with little hope of improving professional practice in the classroom or school. There is typically little capacity or opportunity for continued feedback, collegial or otherwise. There are great examples of school districts who work with educational service agencies and with higher education to provide the long-term, comprehensive professional development support that teachers and principals deserve, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule.
The professional development system for educators needs to be much better. This lack of capacity to support professional talent makes continued improvement difficult. It makes providing support for the more significant changes that contemplate redesign even more challenging.
I believe it is largely up to states to organize, implement and support the regional systems that can provide this human resource support to school districts. It must be much more than providing a speaker for a scheduled school district in-service day.
I will offer more specific suggestions for states, for education service agencies and for the actions at the national level in future posts.