Conclusion

The purpose of this study was to increase understanding of how organizations support or fail to support a work culture that values ongoing education and to better understand what comprises the environment, desire, and means in which effective staff development and training takes place. As the nation increasingly focuses on the need to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, it is not surprising that research on teachers and teaching has become more concerned with the context of teachers' work and the need for meaningful change in professional development. By examining ongoing teacher development, policy analysts are deepening their understanding of the organizational conditions necessary to improving the quality of the current teaching force and ensuring the continual growth of the next generation of teachers.

Throughout the research study detailed here, the Framework for Comparative Analysis (Figure 1) provided the boundaries for the interview protocols and analysis of the data collected in the public-education and private-sector cases. Each Framework category was selected to describe a particular aspect of organizational culture and institutional support for staff development and training in public education and in the private sector. The Framework was not designed to be used as the basis for comparing professional development in BlueRibbin with that at Reeching Heights. Rather, it is a tool for organizing data collected that has potential implications for how professional development in education will be supported and funded in the future.

One way to measure the findings resulting from the cross-sector analysis in this research study is whether the private-sector experience can provide any new data that is relevant for education reform. A second measure is whether the experiences and examples gleaned from these two exemplary sites are relevant for the majority of public schools, which do not have the same access to resources and supportive leadership present at Reeching Heights and BlueRibbin. Although the framework categories have provided a consistent structure for this research, the following is meant to summarize the study findings and place them in a context useful to school leaders and policymakers who are interested in improving professional development opportunities for teachers.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

Cultural Alignment of Professional Development
Both case-study sites provided examples of various elements that can build an organizational culture that supports professional development. One important element is that leadership must demonstrate its commitment to its value through the funding and the messages transmitted to employees. Interestingly, interviews with employees about their commitment to continuing education at BlueRibbin did not garner the same sense of commitment communicated in interviews with company management. What this disparity begins to explain is that simply providing access to opportunities for professional growth is not an intrinsic motivator for many people; rather, organizational leadership must build a culture in which the values and norms that support continuing education are an integral part of everyday work.

Second, professional development must be coordinated with organizational goals. Much of the fragmentation common in professional development programs and policies in the education sector is the result of inappropriate structures and too little time. However, the lack of coordination does little to build a supportive organizational culture around the value of continuing education. In this study, both professional development programs were successful largely because of the status and responsibility for coordinating staff development and training programs that senior management accorded to BRE and the SSS office. One outgrowth of a more systemic approach to continuing education is the greater alignment between individual growth and organizational goals.

This does not mean that such coordination should take the form of establishing results-oriented criteria and measuring professional development outcomes according to those criteria. In the public-education sector, state policymakers clearly want to tie new professional development funding to results; professional development funding levels in education frequently are tied to state and local education leaders' perceptions of how effectively the investment will improve student learning. However, this strategy has at least two key problems:

1. It is very difficult to accomplish and thus may actually show that the leadership does not have an unwavering commitment to the potential of professional development.
2. It has a tendency to freeze the goals of the organization and thus of professional development rather than allowing them to evolve to meet the changing conditions that confront the organization.

The needed coordination may be accomplished more appropriately by establishing an ongoing procedure by which the goals of the organization are considered and reconsidered in the planning for professional development. The process of engaging employees and management in a continuous cycle of needs sensing and feedback on staff development and training at BlueRibbin is an example of a highly coordinated system of continuing education that does not link funding levels for professional development to outcome criteria for organizational performance.

The third element contributing to the legitimization of continuing education in an organization is that employees must recognize that professional development has multiple functions in achieving evolving organizational goals. These functions can include:

1. The recruitment of high-quality staff.
2. The development and maintenance of a strong organizational learning culture for both new and experienced employees.
3. The development of technical skills for employees.
4. The development of effective problem-solving strategies among employees.
5. The legitimization of a personnel assessment system that emphasizes individual work performance (by giving all employees the resources to improve their performance).
6. The retention of high-performing staff who consider changing jobs an interruption of their professional growth.

Organizational Alignment of Professional Development
Both case-study sites provided examples of how schools and districts might restructure their organizational approach to continuing education, including a variety of elements that might make professional development more effective. The literature on professional development in education and the private sector illustrates that continuous learning is an essential part of one's professional practice. Several years ago, Time magazine published the article "Tomorrow's Lesson: Learn or Perish," in which the author predicted that: "Learning will no longer stop with high school or even college. Specialized knowledge will become obsolete so quickly that adults will be encouraged to take frequent breaks from work, subsidized by their employers, to catch up" (Lemonick, 1992, p. 60). The private sector, as illustrated in the case study of BlueRibbin, clearly is taking this prediction seriously and has built an organizational approach that includes the norms, values, and incentives necessary to engage employees in a culture of continual learning. In contrast and despite exemplary reform in professional development in districts such as in Reeching Heights, the public-education sector continues to operate in ways that do not support lifelong learning or change the belief system about the value of professional development. According to a recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll (1999), when asked how to attract and retain good teachers, 85 percent of respondents favored the use of "school-financed professional development opportunities" for teachers. Yet in focus groups also conducted in 1999, researchers found that although the principle of continuing education is enthusiastically endorsed, participants believe that teacher professional development days inconvenience parents and take instructional time away from students (Belden & Plattner, 1999). In the public-education sector, it seems there is a high value placed on the concept of continual learning for teachers that does not translate to actual practice: Schools and districts continue to operate professional development programs that are fragmented and disconnected from the goals of student learning. Clearly, professional development must be supported by adequate resources to accomplish organizational goals, in terms of both the direct support for learning opportunities and employees' time to take advantage of them.

In the study, the findings indicate that neither organization has wavered in its financial support for professional development despite changes in productivity or pressure to allocate resources to other priorities. Decisions about funding for professional development in Reeching Heights, however, tend to be much more process-heavy and involve more players, such as the school board, the union, the superintendent, intermediate school districts, school principals, and so on. As a result, every local decision about professional development requires time-consuming negotiations that are likely to disrupt the continuity of programming. In contrast, at BlueRibbin the need for consensus building among managers regarding funding for professional development is minimal, although the heavy investment of time can be a contentious point.

In terms of other forms of support for individual learning opportunities, both case-study sites provide a variety of incentives, such as career advancement, additional pay, and time to interact with colleagues, to entice employees to participate in staff development and training. However, in most schools and districts, pursuing an advanced degree—often unrelated to school or student performance—continues to be the primary avenue for achieving a pay increase. This does not appear to be the case in the private sector where professional development is built into the expectations of employee work roles.

Building time into the employee's job for continuing education is a critical element in designing an organizational approach to professional development. There is a significant disparity between BlueRibbin and Reeching Heights in the time available to employees for professional development during the workday. In addition, there are differences between the two case-study sites in how employees are compensated for on-the-job learning. In the private sector, the time an employee spends in staff development and training is part of his or her salary. In education, time in professional development is not integrated into the teacher's salary; instead, it is compensated on an individual basis for the number of hours spent above and beyond the nine-month teacher contract. Although it is entirely possible that all the individually and school- and district-supported hours of professional development may exceed or equal the number of hours spent on staff development and training in the private sector (this study did not look at nondistrict-sponsored professional development such as additional academic degrees that teachers acquire to advance on the salary scale)—the end result still would not be the same. Because staff development and training in education is so fragmented and mostly unrelated to improving student performance, it does little to build a culture of professional growth or a shared value of the importance of continual learning.

Closely related to the lack of time for professional growth built into a teacher's workday is the lack of opportunity to collaborate and learn from one another. Lewis et al. (1999) found that "teachers who participated in common planning periods for team teachers at least once a week were more likely than those who participated a few times a year to report that participation improved their teaching a lot (52 percent versus 13 percent)" (p. 9). Collaboration among employees in the private sector was reported to be a routine aspect of the job, while teachers still work primarily in individual classrooms.

IMPLICATIONS AND POLICY PRIORITIES

There are three areas where the results of this research provide lessons for how professional development is introduced and sustained in schools:

1. The need for time for professional development during the school day and year that is not used for administrative purposes is paramount to building a culture of professional growth among teachers.
2. The need for acculturating teachers early into an environment that values continual learning and uses resources such as technology differently to provide an infrastructure and delivery system for school-based professional development is also pivotal to creating a culture of professional growth.
3. The need to align school and district goals with the goals of professional development should be a continuous process that assesses needs and measures progress toward meeting the goals.

The following sections provide education leaders and state and federal policymakers with some initial language to begin designing policies that support an integrated and highly accountable system of professional development in schools and districts.

Implications for Schools and Districts

The need for more consensus building is paramount. Therefore, as seen in Reeching Heights, the visibility of a central coordinating office for professional development activities that is linked to community adult-education programming appears to have a positive effect on the public's perception of the value of professional development for teachers. The continuous support and attention given to reinforcing organizational culture and values by management reduces the need to renegotiate the importance of staff development and training.

One way to gauge support for continuing education is to examine the available resources for professional development. One ongoing problem for Reeching Heights, and public education in general, is that resources for professional development come from a combination of local, state, and federal sources, which makes it difficult to keep good records of how much funding is available and how it is spent. The disparate sources of funding also contribute to the fragmentation of goals and content characteristic of many public education professional development programs. Building consensus around the need for continuing education for teachers among state and local decisionmakers and the community necessitates better record-keeping on the part of schools and districts to better communicate how those dollars are spent.

Implications for Policymakers

In this study, unwavering financial commitment to support professional growth in both cases sent a consistent message to employees and constituents that professional development is a priority. To assist schools and districts with building a continuous funding stream for professional development and reducing programmatic fragmentation, state and federal policymakers should discontinue the practice of awarding categorical dollars that include separate pots of professional development dollars. Instead, professional development resources should be pooled at the state level and awarded to school districts on the basis of school needs with plans that show clear alignment between measurable goals and outcomes. State education agencies should be charged with the responsibility of overseeing local professional development resource implementation and ensuring that evaluation results are available to the public.

The research on adult learning suggests that continued professional growth is not simply a matter of scheduling an activity for the purpose of ensuring attendance or testing individual endurance. Successful professional development must be sustained over time and be directly related to—or integrated into—an individual's everyday work. State and federal incentives could be awarded to school districts that present a three-year plan to reallocate resources for the purpose of restructuring school schedules to allow for 10 percent of a teacher's time for weekly collaborative professional development. Successful proposals would include an overview of how the school and district goals for improvement would be aligned with opportunities for professional growth during the workday and how those opportunities would be sustained. In addition, districts submitting proposals would be required to reach agreement for a minimum of three years on the terms of teacher participation in the program from the chairs of the local teacher union, parent-teacher association, school board, and local chamber of commerce.

As more state education agencies consider proposals that require a one- to two-year induction program for new teachers, state policymakers should begin questioning programs that do not include opportunities for new teachers to participate in collaborative learning experiences with others besides their mentors. Building an organizational culture that values continuing education requires employee participation in joint learning experiences at every level. More effective use of technology as a source of information for new teachers and collegial networking for veteran teachers would help foster an organizational culture that values professional growth.

Implications for Further Research

Detractors of this study may suggest that the lessons here are idiosyncratic to the individual cases and cannot be generalized or adapted for improvements in professional development in most schools and districts in the United States. However, it seems the emphasis on supportive leadership, a coordinated organizational approach, and legitimization of the need for professional development early in an individual's career are transferable to any setting. How local schools and districts choose to implement these findings is another issue entirely. A second phase of this study might extend the major findings identified in these two exemplary sites and attempt to create benchmarks that measure organizational support for professional growth in additional private- and public-sector cases, such as medicine, law, and government.

This study focused on characteristics of institutional support for and implementation of local professional development. Questions about the content of staff development and training in the private sector and its relevance for professional growth in schools and districts are increasing, but the answers are largely unknown. There is plenty of solid research on what constitutes good professional development in education; however, how it stacks up to good professional development in other fields may provide insights that further support the organizational and cultural findings resulting from this study.

Finally, the categories in the Framework for Comparative Analysis provide a new model to study individual and institutional support for organizational initiatives. Further research on this topic might extrapolate the use of the framework categories to multiple sites to test the validity of the findings resulting from the comparative analysis and whether those findings hold true in additional private-sector and public-education sector cases.

For more information on the study methodology and technical aspects on the report, please contact Sabrina Laine at North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

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