This is what PD in the Chicago Public Schools looks like.

[Ted King]

I have pretty good guess on how this came about. Because of a law or community pressure, the school district's board or a high administrative official in the district decided they needed to do something to resolve a problem. They handed it off to a lower level administrator who administers a dozen other programs already. The lower level administrator is told about or remembers a conference where there were presentations about how to deal with this kind of problem. The presenters were probably teachers who didn't really want to teach in a classroom with a bunch of snotty kids anymore but still needed income so they decided to go out and hawk some "wonderful new program" which is just some old idea recycled with the new buzz words (it can be a good gig - they can be paid to hawk their programs at a conference and then make money selling the programs to school districts). Just the thing a busy administrator needs to check the boxes his bosses want checked. Cut the check. Check. Calendar in the trainings. Check.

The hawkers of the program can't be bothered with the grunt work of actually implementing the program, so they hire some teacher who also is tired of being in a classroom with snotty kids to teach the program to teachers. That teacher soon realizes that teaching teachers that are mandated to go through the training is worse than teaching kids so she regiments the crap out of the curriculum - teaching to the multiple choice test. Just get them to pass the test. Another check mark checked.