Gentle teaching, empowering children growing up amid poverty and violence, is the only alternative to ineffective coercive teaching. "Decent" teachers are not judgmental, moralistic, or easily shocked; they listen, recognize their biases, are culturally competent, and do not seek to fulfill power needs. (SK)

"Star" urban teachers are driven by the desire to develop good people. Their undergirding ideology is high expectations for low-income students, and they see their role as fundamentally different from that of other teachers. (SK)

Proposes 12 teacher attributes that are important in multicultural schools, focusing on specific teacher qualities and ideology and explaining that selecting teachers who are predisposed to perform the sophisticated expectations of multicultural teaching is a necessary precondition. Training has important value after preselection, providing it…