Effective teaching has long been shown to be important for students of disadvantaged socioeconomic status (SES) (Burgess et al., 2022; Chetty et al., 2014). Therefore, improved teaching in such settings should have particularly strong effects. Can this be promoted via teachers’ professional development (PD)? While meta-reviews have shown that experimentally evaluated PD programs on average raise student achievement (Basma & Savage, 2023; Kraft et al., 2018; Sims et al., 2023), some PD programs show no effects on student achievement and the effectiveness of PD varies across settings (Hill, Beisiegel, & Jacob, 2013). Moreover, typical PD may not adhere to the criteria of effective PD characterizing experimentally evaluated programs, which may explain that studies of typical PD have found little evidence of positive effects on student achievement (Harris & Sass, 2011; Kirsten et al., 2023). To determine whether teacher PD addresses educational equity, we first investigate differences in teachers’ average professional development (PD) participation across socioeconomic student groups using descriptive statistics and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) across 16 countries between 2003-2019. Next, using a within-student-between-subjects (WSBS) design, we compare the effects professional development participation on student achievement in 16 education systems. Finally, we examine the effects of teacher participating in PD across teachers with different qualification levels: experience, subject matter specialization, and pedagogical certification. The WSBS design controls for unobserved student characteristics and school quality but introduces other methodological hurdles which we discuss in the paper—most notably, a loss of statistical power when the fixed effects reduce the variation to within students between subjects. We find little evidence of general differences in PD participation across socioeconomic settings in the investigated school systems. Moreover, we find small and statistically insignificant effects of typical PD on student achievement despite socioeconomic settings. The null pattern of effects continues despite the level of teacher qualification in experience, pedagogical certification, and subject matter education. We therefore conclude that average or typical teacher PD may not effectively target the problem of educational inequity, and that improvements to typical teacher PD are warranted to justify further investment.

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