The North Carolina Race to the Top (RttT) professional development plan is an expansive and multi-faceted effort to increase student achievement by updating the knowledge and skills of the state’s entire K-12 public education workforce. This initiative is driven by a host of recent changes, including: adoption of new Common Core State Standards and North Carolina Essential Standards; increased use of data to inform classroom and school decisions; rapid changes in the technologies and digital resources available for teaching and learning; new teacher and administrator evaluation processes; and an increased emphasis on formative assessment to inform instructional decisions.

The human resources challenge of the initiative—to provide the state’s 100,000 teachers and 2,400 principals with professional development that will enable them to extend their knowledge, improve professional practices, and, ultimately, increase student achievement overall and close achievement gaps among student groups—is formidable. The timeframe (the four-year period of the grant), diversity of the State (from large metropolitan local education agencies [LEAs] to small, rural, and resource-limited LEAs, many of which continue to struggle under the weight of fiscal constraints), and expectations (to create a statewide professional development infrastructure that can be sustained after RttT funding ends) only increase that challenge. The RttT professional development evaluation is being conducted in full recognition of these circumstances, as well as of the deep commitment of the members of the RttT Professional Development Implementation Team. The intent of the evaluation is to provide data-driven information that can support reflection about and improvement of this effort.

Four general questions guide the evaluation:

1. State Strategies: To what extent did the state implement and support proposed RttT professional development efforts?

2. Short-Term Outcomes: What were direct outcomes of State-level RttT professional development efforts?

3. Intermediate Outcomes: To what extent did RttT professional development efforts successfully update the NC education workforce?

4. Impacts on Student Performance: To what extent are gains in student performance outcomes associated with RttT professional development?

The overall evaluation of the impact of state-level RttT professional development efforts centers on collection and analyses of: (1) an annual RttT Omnibus Survey study, as a way to gauge changes in awareness, attitudes, knowledge/skills, and practices of educators across the state; and (2) a mixed methods longitudinal descriptive study to provide an in-depth look at the implementation and impact of RttT initiatives at the local level, with a focus on a purposeful sample of 27 school sites across the state. Both the Omnibus Survey and the longitudinal study will continue through the remaining two years of the RttT grant and will be discussed in each annual professional development evaluation report. This paper will present findings from the final year of the North Carolina’s Race to the Top Professional Development implementation.