Staffing, Financing, and Governing Professional Development Schools

The professional development school concept represents an attempt to reshape the relationship between public schools and colleges of education to provide for more effective preservice and inservice education, improved educational programs for K-12 students, and an expanded knowledge base for dealing with the instructional, curricular, and organizational reform agenda facing schools. The purpose of this paper is to (a) confront the financial and organizational problems that school and university personnel are likely to face in developing professional development schools and (b) identify structures and processes that will allow these schools to contribute to the simultaneous reconstruction of the public schools in which teachers work and the university programs in which they prepare.