The College of Teacher Education and Leadership (CTEL) at Arizona State University (ASU) embraced the opportunity to partner with Teach For America (TFA) to tailor existing teacher preparation programs to meet the unique needs of alternatively certified teachers in urban schools. Rather than harp on the distinctions between ideologies and…

A primary purpose of teacher education is to prepare and induct candidates into the teaching profession. What does it mean to be a professional educator? Is deep content knowledge really enough as the federal government and others suggest? Does professionalism look different in urban contexts? How do teachers learn to navigate the multiple…

How can we better educate disadvantaged urban students? Drawing on over five years' experience in a broad partnership involving twelve urban professional development schools in five districts, a teachers' union, a comprehensive public university, and several community-based organizations, the contributors to this volume describe how they worked…

This article describes a school-university partnership that focuses on the development of classroom management skills for preservice teachers in an urban setting, through collaboration between mentors, principals, and a university supervisor. To prepare preservice teachers for the unique challenges of urban schools, three key elements were…

The majority of the teacher candidates in my methods classes come from a background that is different from the primarily African American students at my professional development school. Because these teacher candidates continue to be predominantly White middle-class females, the gap between their cultural comfort zone and their students' cultural…

The Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), in partnership with the Aspen Institute and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), has been investigating the urban teacher residency (UTR) -- an innovative response to the longstanding challenges of how to recruit, prepare, and retain bright and capable teachers for…

Systemic, university-school-community partnerships characterize efforts by Georgia State University to enhance preparation of urban teachers and urban student success. A partnership with the Atlanta Housing Authority focuses on family education in mixed-income communities. Work with the National Parks Service's Martin Luther King, Jr., Center…

The purpose of this study was to examine preservice teacher learning in an integrated course and field experience in an urban school-university partnership. Study participants included two cohorts of preservice teachers at a large, northeastern research university who were completing a semester-long experience of site-based coursework and…

The 3-mile neighborhood along the boulevard from San Diego State University to the City Heights is one of San Diego's most diverse, with more than 30 languages spoken among its 72,000 residents. It has also developed a reputation as one of the city's most impoverished and crime-ridden. More than a decade ago, as part of an effort to transform City…

The "National Dropout Prevention Newsletter" is published quarterly by the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Education in the Urban Context (Ed Lambert); (2) An Interview with Paul Reville, Massachusetts Secretary of Education; (3) Communities In Schools of Chicago (Jane…

The Urban Educator Corps, comprised of urban education school deans and faculty members from thirty-nine public urban research universities, is committed to advancing the quality of urban education, specifically addressing the key issues of teacher quality, student retention and success, and the creation of systemic partnerships. This article…

This dissertation investigates how teaching in a hands-on science center contributes to re/shaping one's teaching identity. Situated at the New York Hall of Science (NYHS) in Queens, New York, my research approach is to conduct a critical ethnography where the focus is on improving the teaching and learning of science for all involved. In…

The revolving door appropriately describes the attrition among beginning teachers. Especially high attrition plagues our urban schools where highly qualified teachers are most crucial. Even though research over 3 decades has provided the basis for intricate induction programs, not all new teachers experience them. Effective mentoring has provided…

The 21 urban research universities that are members of the Great Cities' Universities (GCU) annually enroll approximately 20 percent of the students in the United States who are preparing to teach in K12 urban schools. This study examined the experiences of GCU-sponsored, school-university teacher preparation partnerships in Atlanta, Houston,…

Scholars have provided numerous critical analyses of the structural causes of poverty. Unfortunately, many teachers are still led to believe, via best selling books and mainstream discourse, that behaviors, neighborhoods, and families determine educational outcomes. This "culture of poverty" theory must be disproved; educators need to be…