Frontline Blog

What steps should you take to activate efficient and consistent data-based decision-making in your district? For district technology teams, this is not an easy question to answer.

Evaluation questions form the cornerstone of professional development program evaluation. They both frame and focus the work, pointing us in the right direction for data collection. After all, how would we know what data to collect, and from whom, if we haven’t settled on the questions we’re asking? Crafting the right questions for a particular evaluation project is critical to an effective evaluation effort.

As states submit ESSA plans, student achievement goals are again under the microscope. And earlier this year, the Pew Research Center highlighted results showing that U.S. student achievement trails behind that of many other developed countries.  

How well are school systems in America measuring up to ESSA’s definition of professional development? Is professional learning “data-driven” and “classroom-focused”? That question is at the heart of Bridging the Gap, a series of reports from the Frontline Research & Learning Institute. Bridging the Gap looks at anonymized data from the professional development experiences of educators across the country and asks, “How close are we to this ideal?”  

Last month we released the first episode of “What you need to know about ESSA,” a four-part podcast series dedicated to helping school and district leaders implement the Every Student Succeeds Act to maximize the opportunity to customize their efforts to meet their own students’ needs.  

Are you looking for ways to measure and refine your professional learning program? Are you comfortable with the ESSA definitions of professional development? Curious how to make meaningful changes to foster collaboration among your staff and truly offer job-embedded learning?

President Trump’s budget proposes massive spending cuts to critical—but often overlooked—funding for the preparation, training and recruitment of high-quality teachers. Title IIa of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, funded at over $2 billion for the last 15 years, including upwards of $2.9 billion under the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, would be cut to nothing. 

With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), one sentence in particular has gotten the attention of educators who work in professional learning: The term ‘professional development’ means activities that … are sustained (not stand-alone, 1-day, or short-term workshops), intensive, collaborative, job-embedded, data-driven, and classroom-focused.  

Frontline Research & Learning Institute’s first installment of a new report series, Bridging the Gap, analyzes anonymized data from Frontline Professional Growth in light of the Every Student Succeeds Act’s definition of effective professional development.