SCS Budget Deficit and Teacher PD

We found out recently that Shelby County faces a $125 million dollar budget deficit. SCS attributes this deficit in large part to students siphoned off by charter schools and the ASD. Sup. Hopson and board members discussed layoffs and outsourcing to deal with the deficit, as well as shuttering some failing schools to keep students in the district.

While reading through the article on Chalkbeat, I found myself asking, “isn’t there some place where SCS can afford to cut within the budget? Something that would help reduce the deficit and not dramatically impact the district’s quality?”

Looking through some SCS documents, I think I may have found an answer to this question, and a possible way to improve PD in the district. This presentation to SCS gives a few ideas on where the district can afford to cut, and one area it names is professional development, or PD. 

What Do We Get for PD Spending?

When I saw PD in this presentation by the district management council, I thought to myself, the district PD can’t be that much given its quality. How much could there be to cut? Imagine my surprise when, one slide later, I saw that we spend $122 million on coaching and PD. That’s around $18,000 per teacher in PD spending, according to slide 11. Compare that to the “typical” urban average district, who spends between $8,000 to 12,000 on PD.

That begs the question – what are we getting for all that PD spending? I worked for the district for two years back when it was legacy Memphis City Schools, and based on my time there, I’d say “not much.”A lot of it felt like cookie cutter straight out of a text book, or sessions that were fun and engaging for teachers, but left me with no real strategies. Some if it came through online modules that were so extensive and tedious they were almost impossible to get through and didn’t really offer teachers too much in the way of actual development. It became, in essence, just another chore that we had to do on top of everything else, and not one that helped us become better teachers.

Let me give you a few examples. At the beginning of each year we had a huge get together at Bellevue Baptist church. I listed to district leaders talk about their plans for the future, went to sessions on fantasy football and teaching through stories. Fun and informative, but if I’m honest, I didn’t learn anything from these that I was able to take back to the classroom.

During the year, PD sessions weren’t much better. I attended several required PD sessions that involved me sitting in a room with dozens of other teachers and listening to a lecture from an ‘expert.’ I’d receive handouts and sometimes binders of information, but little actual instruction on how to make it real in my classroom.

Independent PD was also of questionable quality. To prep us for common core, the district required us to read a series of informational texts and watch a series of videos, then answer a multiple choice set of questions to demonstrate our mastery of common core knowledge. The modules were incredibly extensive and dense, and didn’t contain much on how to apply common core to our classroom. Again, informative, but not very useful in a practical sense.

The coaching wasn’t much better. Many of my early career colleagues, myself included, had coaches in name only who only showed up in our rooms once a month or so, and sometimes less frequently. Not to say they didn’t do a good job when they were there, but it was so infrequent that it wasn’t very helpful for a new teachers.

Now I don’t have all the details of PD and how the money is spent currently. For example, the presentation doesn’t give a breakdown between money spent on PD and money spent on coaches. I also don’t know if PD has changed since my time in the district 2 years ago (I hope it has). But I haven’t heard any glowing reviews from many of my colleagues out there, so its safe to assume that there hasn’t been some incredible transformation in the quality of PD delivered. But even if that was true, it seems like this is an area ripe for some cuts and retooling. Maybe $18,000 would be justified if the PD was high quality, but my own experience and that of many of my colleagues says otherwise.

An Opportunity

This should be viewed as an opportunity not only to trim some fat out of the budget, but also to go back to the drawing board and redesign our entire PD system here in Shelby County. We spend almost double the average of many typical urban districts. Clearly we can be doing more with less, and save ourselves millions in the process. Let us take the opportunity to not only reduce our expenditures on professional development, but also to design smarter and better PD that helps teachers improve and grow throughout their careers and doesn’t just add to the workload at the end of the day. I’m no expert on PD, but I’m sure we can find people who have some ideas on how to transform PD here in Shelby County.

But I’d love to hear from other SCS teachers (current or former) about their experience with PD. Am I off base? Is it worth the $18,000 we spend on it? Has quality improved? Or is there room to trim and redesign? And what should good PD look like? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Follow Bluff City Education on Twitter @bluffcityed and look for the hashtag #iteachiamand #TNedu to find more of our stories.  Please also like our page on facebook.