Archived Information

School Finance: Chapter 70 Program

Professional Development Spending in Massachusetts Public School Districts

Roger Hatch, Administrator, School Finance, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
Rob O'Donnell, Research Director, School Finance, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

Since FY96 state budget language has required school districts to spend specified amounts from their Chapter 70 school aid upon professional development. The requirement was $25 per foundation pupil in FY96. The per pupil amount rose by $25 each year until in reached $125 in FY00. It has remained at $125 per pupil for each year since. Districts are informed of these amounts in each year's final Chapter 70 release, and at End of Year Pupil and Financial Report (EOYPFR) workshops held annually around the state. The Department of Education notifies districts of whether they did or did not meet the required spending level in "compliance summaries" mailed to superintendents and municipal officials in the fall and winter following submission of the EOYPFR.

The following analysis will report upon what we know about how much is being spent on the professional development function in Massachusetts public school districts, including:

• the way DOE defines and accounts for spending in this area
• the extent to which school districts have complied with the spending requirement since FY96
• how much was spent upon the specific components of professional development in FY02
• how much was spent in FY02 from grants and other revenue sources outside the general fund, and
• how much was spent by each public school in FY02.

Measuring "Professional Development Expenditures"

The Department's Guidelines for Student and Financial Reporting provide the following definition of professional development activities and eligible staff:

• Salaries, full-time directors of professional development or the pro-rated share of the salaries of instructional supervisors, teachers, librarians, audio-visual specialists, guidance counselors, school psychologists or educational television specialists who spend one-half or more of their time providing professional development
• Salaries, teachers, librarians, audio-visual specialists, guidance counselors, school psychologists or educational television specialists who participate in in-service days beyond the contractual number of days of instruction where at least fifty percent of the day is devoted to professional development
• Salaries or the prorated share of salaries, clerical and support staff working on professional development activities
• Salaries, staff substituting for teachers who are participating in professional development activities
• Stipends, professional staff providing or receiving professional development services beyond the regular length of the school day
• Supplies and materials
• Contracted Services
• Dues and subscriptions
• Travel expenses for staff
• Tuition and/or conference fees

Beginning in FY02, the Department expanded accounting code 2350 (professional development) into four separate subcategories that provide greater detail on what constitutes spending in this area. They new codes are:

• 2351 Professional development leadership: salaries and expenses for full-time or prorated salary (if 50% or greater) of directors or staff who coordinate a district's training activities

• 2353 Teacher/Instructional Staff-Professional Days: salaries of teachers and instructional staff who participate in in-service days beyond the contractual number of days of instruction (greater than 180), where at least fifty percent of the day is devoted to professional development. This code also includes stipends for professional staff providing professional development services beyond the regular length of the school day.

• 2355 Substitute Salaries for Teachers/Instructional Staff at Professional Development

• 2357 Professional Development Stipends, Providers and Expenses: Teacher trainers' salaries; full-time or prorated shares of salaries of instructional supervisors, teachers and other professional staff who spend one-half or more of their time providing professional development. Includes professional staff providing training and support to new teachers, teachers being trained to implement new curriculum or instructional practices, and/or teachers targeted for training and support to remedy performance weaknesses. Includes master and mentor teachers, curriculum implementation coaches, and others whose job function is to provide in-district professional development (minimum of .5 full-time equivalency).

Professional Development Spending, Statewide Trends, FY96 to FY03

Table 1 shows statewide general fund expenditures upon professional development between FY96 and FY03.(Berlin and Boylston had not reported their FY02 or FY03 data as of the time of this writing.) Over that time span, spending for this purpose has risen from $47 million to an estimated $135 million.

Districts vary considerably in the extent to which they meet the requirement, as shown in Table 2. In FY02, 220 or two-thirds of the 328 Massachusetts public school districts expended at levels that met or exceeded the required $125 per pupil. Forty-seven districts actually spent more than $300 per pupil. On the other hand, 59 spent less than $100 per pupil-far below the required amount. What are we to make of this latter group, which is not even on the margin of meeting the requirement? Some appear to be failures to properly account for the spending on professional development. Certain others appear to reflect purposeful decisions to use Chapter 70 aid provided for this function to fund other line items in the school budget.

There is no provision in the Chapter 70 statute or state budget language that would impose a fiscal penalty upon districts which do not spend enough to meet their requirement. There is much informal discussion between DOE and district staff about this issue. In addition, making the results available to the municipal side of local government through the compliance summary mailing has been shown to result in pressure upon school committees to increase their planned spending on this function.

The need to fine-tune the spending requirement

An obvious flaw exists in the calculation of this requirement. The calculation of the requirement has relied upon "foundation" enrollment, a measure which counts the pupils for whom a district is financially responsible. That group includes pupils being sent to other districts through the school choice program or tuitioning agreements between school committees. It also includes pupils being educated at Commonwealth charter schools. It is unfair to impose a per pupil spending requirement upon a district sending a significant number of resident pupils to schools not in the district. Farmington River, a K-6 district serving pupils from the towns of Otis and Sandisfield, is a good example.

In FY02, Farmington River's total foundation enrollment was 305. This included 141 pupils in Farmington River's own schools, in grades pre-kindergarten through 6 (the 25 pre-kindergartners count as 13, because they are considered to be in a half-time program). At the 7-12 level, 138 pupils were tuitioned to other districts through school committee agreements, and an additional 26 attended other districts through the school choice program. Its professional development requirement was set at $125 per foundation pupil, times 305 pupils or $38,125. The Farmington River school committee reported spending $29,442 on local teachers at the K-6 level. Stated in terms of 141 local pupils only, this translates into $209 per pupil. For its remaining 164 pupils at other districts, the Farmington River committee had no authority to ensure that any teacher training occurred in the districts where those students were enrolled.

If the requirement is to continue in the future, two alternatives to using foundation enrollment might be considered. First, DOE could base the requirement on local foundation enrollment. Beginning with FY04 Chapter 70, its Student Information System is being used to generate foundation enrollment. That system gives DOE the capacity to distinguish between in-district and out-of-district pupils. Alternatively, a district's full-time equivalent membership in any given year could be used to construct a true per pupil measure.

Spending Upon Specific Components of Professional Development Spending, FY02

Table 3 shows statewide general fund expenditures by DOE function and object code. The pro-rated salaries of teachers and other instructional staff attributed to in-service days during the year represent the largest component ($61.6 million, or 46 percent of the total).

Spending From Sources Outside the General Fund, FY02

Table 4 shows statewide expenditures from all funding sources. School committee appropriations from the general fund represent two-thirds of what was spent upon professional development in FY02. Federal grants made up another 18 percent. State grants-which do not count any of the Chapter 70 aid for this function-made up 14 percent. The total amount spent was $202,415,391 or $211 per pupil.

Recent years have seen marked increases in professional development spending from grants. Federal grant outlays for this function have risen from $18 million in FY00, to $27 million in FY01, to $36 million in FY02. State expenditures rose from $8 million in FY00 to $13 million in FY01 to $28 million in FY02.

When pressed for reasons why they do not spend the required $125 per pupil from the general fund, a common response from districts is that they spend at least that much if their other funds are taken into account. That does not excuse failure to adhere to one of the few area-specific spending requirements imposed by Chapter 70. But it is worth pointing out that the number of districts meeting the $125 per pupil level in FY02 rises from 220 to 267 when their grants and other funds are added in to the mix.

School Level Professional Development Expenditures

The EOYPFR now requires school districts to report their instructional expenditures (2000 series) from school committee, federal and state grants, and other sources at the school level. This gives us the ability to analyze professional development spending in a greater level of detail than was possible before fiscal year 2001.

Our school based reports allow districts to distinguish between districtwide expenditures (costs that cannot be attributed to a single school) and site based expenditures. Some districts report greater shares of their instructional expenditures as districtwide than others, but we anticipate that the level of unattributed expenditures will fall in future years as districts become more accustomed to site based reporting.

Table 5 summarizes how the professional development spending reported on schedule 3 was distributed between districtwide and school reports and across the four professional development function codes. What it shows is that $95,260,347 or 46.70% of professional development spending was not attributed to an individual school. However, $67,477,793 or 70.84% of this amount was spent on professional development stipends, providers, and other related expenses. This functional area, which represents monies paid to teacher trainers and for teacher trainings, lends itself to districtwide reporting perhaps more than any other professional development category. So the fact that nearly half of all professional development spending was not assigned to the school level probably is not in and of itself problematic. Of the total spent on teacher/instructional staff professional days, $55,582,512 or 87.44% was reported at the school level. More was spent districtwide on professional development leadership than was spent at the school level, but this likely reflects the fact that this category includes district level curriculum administrators as well as site based staff.

For the second part of this analysis we calculated a per pupil spending amount for professional development for every school in the Commonwealth using all funding sources and enrollment from the October 1, 2001 Individual School Report (ISR). Table 6 includes a complete listing of this data. The state average across all schools, which you can see at the bottom of the table, was $113.24. Figure 1 shows how many schools fall within certain ranges of per pupil spending. As both the table and figure show, there is a wide range, from a low of $0.00 to greater than $1,000 per pupil in a few instances.

Table 7 looks at the differences in per pupil spending on professional development between elementary schools, junior high and middle schools, and high schools. Interestingly spending per student at the high school level is significantly higher than it is among elementary and junior high and middle schools, which are within a few dollars of each other. Whether or not these differences are related to the professional development opportunities offered to teachers or a function of staffing levels relative to the number of students at each grade is not clear from just looking at the numbers. It should be noted that some of the schools in the elementary grouping include grades K-08 and that some high schools actually range from grades 07-12.