The centrality of knowledgeable, skilled teachers to providing a quality education is a common truism held up by all sectors weighing in on education. Helping teachers maintain and strengthen their abilities is an obviously wise investment, but is nonetheless is now jeopardized by the huge budget deficits schools are facing, including the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). In fact, among the strategies being considered to bridge the SFUSD’s $113 million two-year deficit are reducing the number of professional development days and eliminating sabbaticals, opportunities which allow teachers to take off a year to refresh themselves, pursue new avenues within teaching, and return with an entirely new framework.

When teacher development is so at risk, counter-instances that prioritize it stand out. One such example made an appearance recently in San Francisco, in the form of the donor-supported grant giving organization Fund For Teachers. Established several years ago in Minneapolis and now based in Houston, Texas, Fund For Teachers provides grants to teachers in various cities throughout the country for “self-designed professional development” to be taken over the summer break. Individuals can apply for up to $5,000 and teams can apply for up to $10,000.

In California, Fund For Teachers provides grants to teachers in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles. Just a few weeks ago, the selection committee for San Francisco met to distribute a total of $45,000 to applicants, giving out seven grants that will involve 16 teachers. These are not huge grants, but from listening to the proposals and the discussions among the individuals on the selection teams, they make huge differences to the teachers who receive them, the schools they teach at and the students in the classrooms. Over and over the word “transformational” was used in describing the impact of past successful grant projects and the potential with this new set of projects.

What makes Fund For Teachers stand out is that for the most part, it uses teachers to evaluate the proposals of other teachers, using a rigorous framework that prioritizes attributes linked to “teacher growth and learning,” “student growth and learning” and “benefits to the school community” in addition to other factors. Through a blind review process, teachers independently read a set of proposals, evaluate them using a detailed scoring rubric, and then meet in a small group to discuss the evaluations and nominate the top proposals. Selectors also are free to nominate no proposals, something which apparently actually does happen once in a while. This means that the quality of the proposals is paramount; only those projects that colleagues truly feel are rigorous and worthwhile will make the cut.

In watching this process unfold over the course of the evening, it was difficult not to contrast it with the standard professional development days provided by our district and presumably most districts, trainings which come from the top down and are of varying quality. The training supported by Fund For Teachers is a different type of beast altogether. It allows engaged teachers the chance to reflect on their own knowledge and practice and think about what they are missing or what they want to change and then to make it happen. The program is structured in such as way as to try to extend the benefits of each individual teacher’s experience to others at their school and plans are underway to extend it to all “Fellows” (those who have received grants in the past) and further across schools within a district.

The Fund For Teachers model of professional development could never entirely replace the district’s organized professional development program, because not every teacher will find out about, make the time for or be selected for a project. And of course, some issues are district or school wide matters and require organization and implementation at the corresponding level. But the idea of more individualized teacher designed training that could be replicated on a larger scale is very intriguing. After-all, in many ways, teachers and their peers know best what they are missing.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.