Teacher turnover in urban high-poverty schools is detrimental to students' achievement. In fact, one of the most prevalent social justice issues today is the unequal distribution of experienced teachers to urban high-poverty schools. Researchers suggest that experienced teachers are more effective at raising student performance than new or early…

Substantial teacher turnover poses a challenge to staffing public schools with effective teachers. The scope of the teacher retention challenge across school districts, however, remains poorly defined. Applying consistent data practices and analytical techniques to administrative data sets from 16 urban districts, we document substantial…

From the outset, President Obama placed teacher quality at the center of his Education Plan. The president and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have focused on teacher evaluation as the means of securing the best teachers for American students. This is evident from the push to use student achievement data in teacher evaluation in Race to the Top…

Broadly speaking, this reflection approaches the on-going concern of capacitating an overwhelmingly White teaching profession for effectively teaching inner-city students attending "de facto" segregated schools. Using professional identifications, this reflection presents narrativized understanding of respondents' "becoming"…

Educating a nation of culturally, ethnically/racially, and linguistically diverse (CLD) students is one of the many challenges facing teachers and teacher educators, resulting in teachers' questioning their ability to improve learning for these groups. Yet teacher efficacy is significantly related to student achievement, motivation, and students'…

This study followed a causal comparative research design that utilized mixed methods. This non-experimental investigation sought to identify potential cause and effect relationships between variations in achievement data among schools. The purpose of the study was to determine if urban students' reading and math achievement increased as a result…

Understanding urban teachers' beliefs about African American students has become important because (a) many teachers are reluctant to teach students from other cultures, and (b) most teachers are European American. To construct a psychometrically sound measure of teacher beliefs, the authors investigate the measurement properties of a teacher…

The purpose of this study was to develop a profile of an effective urban music educator in an effort to provide strategies for university teacher training programs to prepare students to teach in urban schools. The study examined urban music teachers' (N = 158) educational background, effective and ineffective characteristics, perceived…

This study investigated changes in teacher candidates' perceptions of teaching in urban schools as they completed a 4-year teacher education program. Candidates were asked to respond in writing to two questions: "What are your concerns about teaching in an urban school?" and "What are the advantages of teaching in an urban…

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,…

Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin examine how salary and working conditions affect the quality of instruction in the classroom. The wages of teachers relative to those of other college graduates have fallen steadily since 1940. Today, average wages differ little, however, between urban and suburban districts. In some metropolitan areas urban…