To adequately prepare effective teachers for urban schools, traditional university-based programs of teacher education need to make serious structural and content changes. This article offers 16 assertions about specific changes that are needed and maintains that, in many alternative certification programs, most of the 16 assertions are…

Fundamental to evaluating the effectiveness of teacher education is determining whether the theory and practice of preservice training carry over into inservice teaching. Considering the large number of beginning teachers who soon drop out of teaching, it appears that they do not. Possibly teacher educators have put too much reliance on the…

Describes the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center (MTEC), a new system of alternative preservice and inservice teacher education which meets the needs of the Milwaukee Public Schools and prepares teachers to succeed with children in poverty within an urban school district. The paper discusses what works in preparing urban teachers and explains how…

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…

This paper asserts that the growth and maintenance of failed urban school districts that have miseducated minority children in poverty for over 50 years is a predictable, explainable phenomenon. The essay suggests that the extensive resources funneled into these systems are used for increasing district bureaucracies rather than improving…

Presents guidelines to inform teacher education programs aspiring to prepare teachers for working in impoverished urban schools: (1) attributes of preservice teacher candidates, (2) teacher educator expertise, (3) knowledge, behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and values to be learned by prospective teachers, (4) educational methods, and (5) program…

Study surveyed students in an alternative, multicultural teacher certification program to determine how well the Urban Teacher Selection Interview could predict the success of future urban teachers. Comparisons between their interview rankings and their rankings as classroom teachers indicated that degree of future teaching success can be…

The purpose of this publication is to examine five standards of excellence for judging teacher education programs. The paper is organized into five sections with the standards stated as questions and summarized as guidelines. The five questions discussed are: (1) What are the attributes sought in those selected to become teachers? (2) What is the…