Building Financial Leadership in Education to Do More for Students

The project team will examine finance training in 40 current administrator preparation programs at colleges of education, postsecondary policy programs, and principal preparation programs to catalogue the types and content of required finance-related courses and identify the finance skills and topical knowledge the course content is intended to develop. The team will release a brief summarizing the findings from this landscape analysis including both what is being taught and what gaps exist in current course offerings.

The project team will turn its current training materials into modules that address what was found in the landscape analysis (both content covered and gaps). The modules will include facilitator guides with lecture notes, presentation slides, worksheets or assignments (with answer keys and/or grading rubrics), supplemental reading lists, and video teaching demonstrations. The modules are intended for use in both online and in-person instruction and will be published as a downloadable workbook on the Edunomics Lab website. One module will be turned into an asynchronous online training to explore whether a full online course can be developed.

The modules will be pilot tested and feedback on them obtained through their use by five postsecondary faculty in their courses, their use at trainings held by professional associations of school and district administrators, and by SEAs and LEAs' use of them in their own administrator professional development programs. In addition, the asynchronous online module will be offered to district and school leaders for their use and review.

Using the feedback from the multiple pilot tests, the project team will revise the modules and release them for free use by colleges of education or other training programs. If the asynchronous online module is found useful, the team will develop a plan to turn all the modules into an online course offered by Georgetown University. The team will also develop and release two plans in support of the wider use of the modules. One plan will identify the opportunities, cost structure, and funding mechanisms for the scaling up the delivery of the modules through existing and new programs. The second will be a research plan for evaluating the effect of the training on administrators' capacity to leverage funds to improve student outcomes.