Professional development is seen as an important tool for improving teaching in schools and thereby achieving better academic results.
The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) produced a study looking at professional development of teachers in the United States, compared those results with nations around the world, and cross-referenced their findings with student achievement in each country. The results are clear. Nations that invest the most in continually improving and strengthening the skills of their educators have the highest gains in student achievement.
Professional Learning in the Learning Profession
Professional Learning in the Learning Profession (Technical Report)

The New Teacher Center (NTC)  is a national non-profit organization set up by teachers and dedicated to improving student learning by accelerating the effectiveness of teachers and school leaders. NTC also has expertise in school leadership development, policy development, and teaching and learning conditions.
NTC's latest report on teacher development:

A Teacher Development Continuum
The Role of Policy in Creating a Supportive Pathway into the Profession
Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy, New Teacher Center
New Teacher Center Policy Brief June 2009
Teachers are the strongest school-related influence on student learning. Research has consistently found a positive relationship between years of teaching experience and higher student achievement, with teachers who have five or more years in the classroom demonstrating greater effectiveness.

Teachers for a New Era is a landmark initiative designed to strengthen K-12 teaching by developing state-of-the-art programs at schools of education. With funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Annenberg Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, this reform initiative has established three guiding principles as critical in the redesign of schools that prepare teachers.

What Teachers Need
By Michelle Exstrom
State Legislatures September 2009
Research into why teachers leave the profession is helping lawmakers craft better policies to hold onto them.

Local Educators Study Promising Japanese Teaching Method
By Emma Brown
Friday, October 9, 2009 Washington Post Staff Writer
The evidence is pretty good that the only kind of improvements in teaching that are going to be sustainable are going to be small, incremental improvements," Stigler said in an interview. Lesson study is a way to organize those small improvements. Teachers work together on a "research lesson," sometimes over the course of an entire year. They identify an objective, come up with a way to teach it and then script students' anticipated misunderstandings and the teacher's response to those misunderstandings.

The $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund is the largest ever federal competitive investment in school reform.
The Race to the Top Fund provides competitive grants to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform in four areas:

• Implementing standards and assessments
• Improving teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution
• Improving collection and use of data
• Supporting struggling schools.

Secretary for Education Arne Duncan op-ed in the Washington Post on the Race to the Top Fund.

Interpreting “Race to the Top”: Summary & Analysis of USDE Draft Guidelines by The New Teacher Project (TNTP).

Rewarding Achievement (REACH)
REACH aims to improve the college preparedness and four-year college graduation rates of low-income high school students, especially those from ethnic and racial groups that are underrepresented in higher education. REACH does this by encouraging students at 31 New York inner city high schools to enroll and excel in the most rigorous courses offered at their schools – Advanced Placement (AP) – and by supporting dynamism and innovation at participating schools.

REACH gives financial awards of $300 to $1,000 – REACH Scholar Awards – to students at participating high schools, for each AP exam score of 3, 4 or 5 that they earn, and provides students with free AP workshops and other resources to help them succeed.

REACH also rewards schools and educators with performance-based REACH Bonus Grants. The Bonus Grants for schools are potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars, which can be invested to strengthen academic programs, course offerings, and professional development.

Opportunity NYC
The principal objective of Opportunity NYC is to test the impact of monetary incentives on children’s education, family health and adults’ workforce outcomes. Families can gain financial rewards by: passing standarized tests, school attendence and attending Parent-teacher meetings.

Students in Cash-Incentives Study Score Higher in Math
Debra Viadero
Education Week Feb 27, 2008.
Federal pressure to improve student test scores is prompting some school districts to pay students for improved performance.

Wage Learners
By Zach Patton
Governing August 2009
Some big-city school systems are experimenting with paying students to get good grades. Are cash incentives a ticket to college or a deterrent to learning for its own sake?

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Educational Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Domestic Policy Council Executive Office of the President
19 October 2009
Providing a high-quality education for all children is critical to America’s economic future. Our nation’s economic competitiveness depends on providing every child with an education that will enable them to succeed in a global economy that is predicated on knowledge and innovation. In recognition of this fact, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provided approximately $100 billion to deliver emergency education funding to states and drive key school reforms.

National Education Association (NEA) launches “Turn Around Initiative” committing $6 million to support quality teaching in high-needs schools.

NEA feels that solutions are available if policymakers, parents, and teachers themselves promote thoughtful and comprehensive strategies to address working conditions, school leadership, and teacher quality. That belief has prompted the NEA in partnership with the Center for Teaching Quality to release,“Children of Poverty Deserve Great Teachers: One Union’s Commitment to Changing the Status Quo,” a report that highlights what is needed to identify and develop teachers and to recruit and retain them for high-needs classrooms.

Democrats and Schools
By Nicholas D. Kristoff
New York Times, October 14, 2009
Research has underscored that what matters most in education — more than class size or spending or anything — is access to good teachers. A study found that if black students had four straight years of teachers from the top 25 percent of most effective teachers, the black-white testing gap would vanish in four years.

Don’t Forget Curriculum
Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies
The Brookings Institution, October 2009
The nation has made a large investment in education R&D to create and evaluate curriculum materials. Content experts and teachers think it is critically important. States with adoption policies for textbooks agree. The What Works Clearinghouse, established during the Bush administration, directed much of its effort to summarizing curriculum evaluations for use by practitioners and policymakers.

The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School
Joblessness and Jailing for High School Dropouts and the High Cost for Taxpayers
Prepared By Andrew Sum Ishwar Khatiwada Joseph McLaughlin With Sheila Palma
Center for Labor Market Studies Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts October 2009

Numbers and Types of Public Elementary and Secondary Schools
From the Common Core of Data: School Year 2007–08
October 2009
The Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey reports the numbers and types of schools. Information about schools includes the type of school, its status (new, continuing, closed, etc.), and whether it is a charter school, magnet school, or Title I school. The survey also reports the numbers of students and the school’s “locale type,” that is, whether it is in a city, suburban, town, or rural area.

An interview with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
Phi Delta Kappan
September 2009
I'm fighting the fight against those folks who say there should never be a tie between student achievement and teacher performance