REPORT OF PLAINTIFFS
On the Status of the KCMSD's Implementation of the
PROFESIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN
A Report to the Implementation Monitor and the Parties
By Arthur Benson
December 3, 2002
I. Introduction
Believing that substantial reforms in classroom practices (how teachers teach and children learn) are necessary to enable the KCMSD to meet its educational achievement goals and attain unitary status (by eliminating the requisite part of the gap in achievement between black and white students), the plaintiffs have advocated since 1996 for the adoption by the KCMSD of a comprehensive professional development reform plan. Plaintiffs have sought a plan aligned with the teaching objectives of the District, as measured by the mandatory Missouri Assessment Plan standardized tests administered annually to some of KCMSD's students.
In 1998 the KCMSD with the assistance of the Desegregation Monitoring Committee, AFT Local 691, and the plaintiffs adopted such a comprehensive professional development plan and submitted it to the Court in January 1999. The Court gave the plan its preliminary approval in May 1999 and required the KCMSD to implement that plan. Little of the plan, however, was ever implemented. In April 2002, after several false starts by the KCMSD, the Court ordered the KCMSD to agree to a plan for professional development implementation or be subjected to Court-ordered professional development directives issued after an evidentiary hearing on the issues.
On May 1, 2002 the KCMSD, the plaintiffs, and AFT Local 691 agreed in a two-page document to certain fundamental principles concerning professional development. The KCMSD submitted the document to the Court, describing it as a "summary" of KCMSD's professional development agreement with the parties. (1) On May 8, 2002 the Court approved that plan.
Since late August plaintiffs have been gathering information from the KCMSD to document the degree of implementation of the new agreement. Fearful that this latest plan might suffer the same fate as previous plans, plaintiffs have attempted to insure implementation through close monitoring, a practice they expect to continue at least through the end of SY2002-2003. This preliminary report documents progress to date as well as problems encountered by the District in reforming teaching and learning through comprehensive professional development.
II. Implementation by Central Administration of KCMSD's PD Plan
A. Specific PD Activities. The court approved "summary" of KCMSD's core professional development responsibilities lists seven specific areas of activities. Those activities and plaintiffs' early assessment of their implementation follow.
1. Role of Professional Development Committees (PDCs). While the Agreement specifies that the PDCs shall perform the functions of the "school teams" described in the 1999 plan, it is not clear that the PDCs are uniformly discharging this duty. At some schools it appears that ad hoc groups of teachers or the principal and some teachers are directing professional development duties. It is well recognized that professional development activities for specific schools are most effectively implemented where substantial teacher participation, within the context of school or district objectives, is widespread. It may be that the KCMSD's rush in late summer and fall to hire or transfer personnel and implement the professional development agreement resulted in some confusion as to roles and responsibilities that will be sorted out by next semester. It is also noted that the as-yet unnamed school reform plan adopted by the school board on October 30, 2002 provides for a structure of small group governance at odds with the existing duties of the PDCs. These are not inconsistencies that must necessarily frustrate either the professional development or the school reform initiatives of the KCMSD but they are conflicts that the KCMSD will need to resolve in the next few months. From the perspective of plaintiffs, it is not critical what organizational design is used to implement professional development as long as the PD objectives are met. It remains to be seen how the KCMSD will resolve this issue.
2. Budget Matters. The Agreement provides for the allocation, after the elimination of the budgets for the SY2002 instructional coaches of "an additional $50 per student" to schools to enhance job embedded PD activities. The plaintiffs have not sought verification that these monies were in fact allocated but neither have plaintiffs received complaints that the required allocations were withheld. On the other hand, the Agreement provided for the sum of $250,000 to be allocated to some schools because of their special needs. Schools were to be notified, or should have been notified, that they were to receive some specific portion of these funds in May or early June 2002 so the recipient schools could use such funds in making selections among a menu of options for PD activities during SY2003, the year that started in September 2002. Those allocations were not made in a timely manner, no school was able to make its PD elections based on the knowledge that it would receive some share of these funds, and the KCMSD has not, in spite of plaintiffs' requests to the KCMSD that are now over three months delinquent, revealed how, or even whether, it made allocations of these funds to KCMSD schools.
3. School PD Plans. The Agreement requires each school to adopt a PD plan that meets the new requirements of the Agreement. Those plans were expected before school opened in September; they were promised by mid-October; and only a few have been produced as of December 2, 2002. Plaintiffs requested copies of each plan from each school but to date only seven have been received, and those seven vary from poor to barely adequate. Plaintiffs have been informed that most plans were initially rejected by KCMSD administrators for being inadequate.
4. Use of Funds. The Agreement of May 1, 2002 unfortunately used the same phrase, "enhanced funding", in two different sections to refer to two different sources of funding. In paragraph two, it specifically referred to the sum of $250,000 that was to be divided among schools with special needs for professional development that could not be met by the $50 per student allocation, such as schools with very small enrollments. In paragraph four, however, the same phrase, "enhanced funding", refers to both the $50 per student and the $250,000 supplemental funds. This paragraph focuses each KCMSD school on appropriate District-wide objectives from professional development. The monitoring of plaintiffs suggests that most KCMSD schools are struggling to re-invent professional development to meet the KCMSD objectives set out in paragraph four. Some schools have achieved more success than others but the KCMSD is only a few months into the re-invention process. So far very little direct observation of assistance to teachers by principals of the nature suggested in paragraph four has been observed. For the most part, principals seem to be taking a hands-off approach to professional development, participating only at the planning and encouragement level, not leading by example.
5. Menu Selections. Each KCMSD school was required to make selections from a menu of five alternative means of implementing professional development reform, or some combination of a number of those means, and to make those selections by May 31, 2002 so that personnel hiring or transferring decisions could be made as the next school year started July 1, 2002. While the process of making menu selections seems to have been marked by confusion and some chaos, selections were eventually made, and personnel were retained, hired, or transferred. While the schools each seem to have found a path through the confusion of implementing personnel changes, the District itself had less success. The KCMSD committed to creating twelve "new District-level positions for highly qualified content-area specialists to assist schools" with job-embedded professional development in specific content areas. Language arts, math and science were chosen by the District. To date, only ten of the twelve positions have been filled. Plaintiffs in May 2002 urged Dr. Taylor to waive artificial salary constraints so that the District would be able to hire persons who were truly "highly qualified" for these positions but Dr. Taylor resisted, stating that he was confident that he could find twelve highly qualified individuals for these important professional development positions without having to raise salaries or offer bonuses. Whether the ten persons placed in these positions to date are "highly qualified" remains an open issue. To be highly qualified for these positions, the individuals must possess knowledge of the content area in the Core Curriculum and as tested by MAP that is superior to most teachers in that content area. In addition, they require high-order skills in project-oriented classroom practices and job-embedded professional development, especially the ability to model, coach, and mentor classroom teachers in the combination of content knowledge and project-oriented teaching. Plaintiffs will focus some of their monitoring efforts early next semester on the work of the people holding these key positions to determine whether the District has indeed filled them with highly qualified personnel.
6. Inappropriate Uses of PD Funds. Plaintiffs have not audited KCMSD's use of professional development funds to determine whether any were expended for purposes deemed inappropriate under paragraph six and no instances of abuse of these prohibitions have been brought to the attention of plaintiffs.
7. School Improvement Plans and Training PDCs. Plaintiffs have not yet asked to review each school's school improvement plan to determine whether the school's professional development plans have been incorporated. Plaintiffs have not sought to learn whether the Professional Development Committees at each school has been trained on redefining professional development to make it school-based and job-embedded.
B. Overall Assessment. It is the tentative conclusion of plaintiffs that after five months of SY2003, the KCMSD administration has made significant progress in re-inventing how professional development is delivered by central administration in the District. There have been many shortfalls (2) but there have also been successes. The KCMSD is far from full implementation of its new professional development plan at the central administration level but it is well on the road to that objective.
III. School-based Implementation of the PD Plan
Attached to this report is a narrative summary of findings made by Judy Gouwens and Sue Hill based on their school visits to KCMSD schools during November 2002. Plaintiffs plan to continue these observational monitoring activities during the second semester of SY2003, beginning in January 2003. Those observational school visits will focus on full cycles of professional development activities at the schools, e.g., beginning with planning by the instructional coach, including observations, modeling, coaching of individual teachers and assessment and planning of further job-embedded activities. In addition, plaintiffs will monitor the efforts of the KCMSD's ten - or, hopefully, twelve - highly qualified District content specialists. Further reports by plaintiffs on the progress of professional development implementation in the KCMSD are planned for April and June 2003.
1 The KCMSD has agreed to reduce to writing in a single document the KCMSD Professional Development Plan, a plan that does not at present exist in written form, at least not in a comprehensive document or in a comprehensive form agreed to by the parties or approved by the Court. At the Status Conference with the Court on November 7, 2002 counsel for the KCMSD stated that the District expected to circulate a draft Professional Development Plan to the parties for their review within a matter of weeks. That draft has not been produced.
2 The KCMSD and plaintiffs have also not yet agreed on a replacement for the obligation in the 1999 Professional Development Plan concerning District steps to secure within the KCMSD teaching core some number of teachers nationally certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Efforts to reach such an agreement are on-going.