This piece originally ran on LinkedIn and is republished here with permission.
Key points:
“Maybe we have too much teacher training.” That headline is a sentence I never thought I’d write, given that I run a company built around supporting teachers’ professional growth. But it has been sitting with me since I read the latest Education Scorecard report.
The Education Scorecard is a research project led by economists at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford. Their latest release cuts against the conventional story about American student achievement.
The decline in student achievement did not start with the pandemic. It started around 2013.
NAEP reading and math scores in grades 4 and 8 gained roughly two grade levels from 1990 to 2015, then began to unwind. By the time COVID hit, the slide was already underway.
The report points at two possible causes: the rollback of federal accountability after No Child Left Behind and the rise of social media use among school-aged children. The researchers are careful. They do not claim either is a proven cause. The Scorecard is mostly a diagnostic, not a prescription.
But here is what struck me: During the period the data shows decline, U.S. school districts did not pull back on professional development spending.
Estimates from TNTP and others have put district PD investment at roughly $18,000 per teacher per year. The training calendar did not shrink. The funding for federal PD programs like Title II-A held, at least in nominal terms. We spent more on developing teachers over the past decade, and student outcomes fell anyway.
To be certain, I am not suggesting that PD caused the decline.
But the facts do raise an uncomfortable question: If more training money did not move the needle, what kind of training were we buying?
Here is what I think the answer is: The K-12 field defaulted, over a long time, to a training-event model of professional development. Workshop days. Summer institutes. Conference attendance. Online modules that teachers complete in a tab they do not return to. None of those are bad in themselves. But none of them are the thing that actually changes what happens in a classroom.
Research on PD effectiveness has been remarkably consistent on this point for decades. Joyce and Showers showed in the 1980s that workshop training, by itself, transfers to classroom practice somewhere around 5 percent of the time. Add structured follow-up conversations about the teaching practice in classrooms (a.k.a. a “coaching conversation”), and that number climbs to roughly 90 percent.
The variable that matters is not whether the training happened. It is whether anything happened after the training.
I want to be careful here. I am not pointing a finger at any specific district. Most district and instructional leaders are working inside real constraints like shrinking budgets, federal funding uncertainty, and state-level cuts. And within those constraints, leaders are making the best decisions they can.
The pattern I am describing is a field-wide default, not a leadership failure. We collectively built a training-event system because it was scalable and measurable in the metrics we had. It just was not the same thing as teacher learning.
This is part of why the current fight over Title II-A matters. Title II-A is the federal program that represents the only direct federal investment in educator professional learning, at roughly $2.19 billion annually. The current administration’s budget proposes to consolidate and cut it. Learning Forward and more than 100 education organizations are pushing Congress instead to increase Title II-A by 10 percent. I support that push.
The argument should not be whether to fund teacher development. We absolutely should. The argument should focus on what kind of development we are funding.
The most actionable part of the Scorecard is not the diagnosis. It is the recovery section.
Roughly 108 districts have posted real gains in both math and reading since 2022. The Scorecard authors wrote a case study on District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), which is one of them. DCPS reading achievement for grades 3 through 8 now exceeds 2018 levels by about half a grade level.
Two specific levers stood out in that case study: (1) DCPS adopted a proprietary K-5 English curriculum, and (2) DCPS paid teachers stipends to complete specialized literacy training.
I want to be honest about what the DCPS case can and cannot teach us. DCPS has a budget that allows for meaningful teacher stipends. Most districts I know do not. That is a real constraint, and I do not want to skip over it.
The replicable lesson is not DCPS’s budget. It is the principle underneath it. Investing in what happens after the initial training is the variable that matters. DCPS bought it the way it could afford to. Most districts will have to find a different way.
Here is the part I think is genuinely new. For the first time, that different way of investing in regular, ongoing support is available to any district. We are at a point with AI-enabled PD tools where ongoing, between-session support for every teacher is becoming possible at a sustainable cost.
I’m not talking about another workshop, webinar, or asynchronous course that gets opened once. I’m talking about actual coaching infrastructure that is reflective, structured, continuous, and available without requiring every school to add more coaches to a budget that does not have room for one.
That shift to using AI systems within PD is going to take some adjustment for our field. We have spent decades optimizing for in-person training events because that is what scaled. Now something else does. The question for district and instructional leaders is which side of that shift to be on, and what to start protecting in your existing PD budget so the next dollar funds learning rather than another event.
So back to where I started. Maybe we do not have too much teacher training. Maybe we have too much of the wrong type of teacher training.
Either way, the field’s default has been events. The recovering districts are showing what happens when that default changes. The encouraging news is that the change is now affordable in ways it was not five years ago.
What is the lever you have in your district to flip the ratio?
