Don’t miss our newest report on PL Spending!

The Cost of Improvement: How Districts Spend on Teacher Professional Learning

This report and interactive map bring together national data to provide a clearer picture of how districts invest in teachers, and what that means for strengthening teaching at scale.

By

Arielle Boguslav, John Papay, Nate Schwartz, Kea Bekkedahl, Yuno Hamaguchi, and Brendon Krall

Why It Matters: Teacher PL is one of the most powerful levers for improving instruction and student outcomes.

This in-depth report and interactive map allow for a deeper understanding of PL spending nationally, across states, and in individual districts, helping leaders make more informed decisions about how PL dollars are allocated.

What the Data Says: Over the past two decades, professional learning spending has grown at the same pace as overall education budgets, but few districts spend enough to provide all teachers with access to the PL formats with the strongest evidence base.



Use this interactive map to explore national PL spending trends and zoom into the data for specific states and districts. 


A note on methodology: (1) Spending data include $ PER-TEACHER (adjusted for differences in cost of living); % TOTAL EXPENDITURE (PL spending as a % of all spending); % PERSONNEL (% of PL spending allocated to personnel costs); % CHANGE (change in per-teacher PL spending since 2014)  (2) In the state view, data represent the average district in the state. (3) Spending data is included for all districts in our analytic sample, excluding districts with missing, zero, or outlier spending values. (4) In certain cases, we aggregate data across districts in the same supervisory union. Component districts are represented individually on the map, but their data represent estimates for the aggregated group of districts. They are noted by “(aggregated)” in the name. (5) The full methodology is included in the report.

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