The negative impacts of high teacher turnover are widely documented, with particular impact on low-income, high-minority schools. Turnover can be especially widespread in science education, where teachers are in high demand. Although teacher retention is predicated on job satisfaction, which is in turn fostered by opportunities for professional…

Co-teaching has been used to address access and accountability mandates for students with disabilities. Despite research regarding elements needed for co-teaching success, research shows mixed results regarding co-teaching effectiveness as it relates to student achievement. Given that teachers are the most influential school-related factor…

With the current teacher workforce in urban school districts diminishing in size, teacher preparation programs are being called to use creative ways to attract candidates to ensure that schools in urban districts keep their staff filled with highly qualified teachers. This article considers the factors for successful recruitment in an urban…

The focus on measuring student growth based on teacher effectiveness has presented new challenges for an urban school in Massachusetts. The purpose of this general interpretive qualitative study was to examine the instructional practices of a group of middle school teachers, the practices they perceived to be effective for ensuring student…

African American students are not achieving at the levels of their white and Asian counterparts on all measures of achievement including standardized assessments, particularly in mathematics. The existence of a mathematics achievement gap signifies a breakdown in the teaching and learning of mathematics for African American students. This…

The "urban" mathematics classroom has become an increasingly polarized site, one where many middle-class White teachers attempt to bridge the divide between themselves and their relatively economically disadvantaged, non-White students. With its mania for high-stakes testing, current education policy has intensified the importance of…

This study addresses the link between urban teachers' beliefs about their students' ability to succeed in astronomy and their instructional decisions and practices in response to those beliefs. The findings suggest that teachers believe that the student characteristics that are necessary for high achievement in astronomy include specific cognitive…

The purpose of this narrative study was to explore the thoughts, perceptions, and experiences of 12 urban middle school teachers who were once urban middle school students. The study sought to discover reasons why these teachers returned to urban middle schools to teach and why they decided to stay. A qualitative methodology, using the…

With the enactment of the NCLB mandates, emphasis on high-stakes testing became more prevalent than ever. Some argue that high-stakes tests can be a driving force behind fundamental change in schools. Whether or not this type of test-driven change leads to school improvement is an empirical question. What we do know is that high-stake testing can…

Elementary and middle school teachers in urban schools in India provided responses to the science efficacy instrument (STEBI-A). These responses were evaluated using Rasch analysis and parametric tests. Rasch fit statistics and person-item maps were evaluated. It was found that the instrument worked well for the two groups of teachers, but the…

The purpose of this case study was to document the journey of three novice career change science inductees as they became middle-level science teachers in urban low socioeconomic status (SES) schools and included post-internship employment status data on all nine science teachers who completed the alternative certification program, up to the time…

The English-only initiatives sweeping the United States are mainstreaming English language learners into content-area classes designed for native or fluent English speakers, with little, if any, English as a second language (ESL) support. This spells trouble for the ever-growing population of Latinos because ESL teachers are not likely to have the…

This study focuses on three new teachers, Arnie, Andrea, and Frank, who are New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF), a program of alternative teacher recruitment and certification that is in its third year at an urban public college in New York City. This study focuses on just three of the Fellows in order to have a more intense look into the…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]