On Budgets & Professional Development

Patricia Wasley and Stephanie Hirsch:

BUDGETS across the state and nation are being slashed, forcing education leaders to confront economic shortfalls unseen in recent memory and make do with less.

One area especially hard hit by the cuts is professional development -- the process by which we ensure our educators are well equipped to meet constantly evolving demands of helping students succeed. Often overlooked, high-quality professional learning is indispensable in generating the outcomes -- like better test scores and higher graduation rates -- that should be expected of our schools.

Absent high-quality professional learning and support for professional growth, the ability of teachers to meet new challenges becomes compromised and their practices habitual. This makes it more difficult to achieve higher outcomes and is not what we want for our teachers or students.

There has been an increasing emphasis on "adult to adult" expenditures within our public schools, as Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman noted last summer.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 20, 2010 3:02 AM
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