Despite progress in urban teacher preparation over the past 40 years, concerns still remain about transforming programs and practices in order to affect teachers' capacities to work with culturally diverse communities. These concerns include time in course curricula for discussion and reflection on field-based work, adequate supervision in fieldwork sites, time for maintaining contact between universities and field sites, and the limitations of the "one shot deal." Additionally, multicultural service learning and community-based learning have had mixed results as some participants' negative beliefs about urban children and communities emerge as intractable, and program experiences have unwittingly reinforced rather than transformed those attitudes. A promising direction for meeting these challenges may be derived from Robert Yinger's (2005) call to reconceptualize teaching as a "public profession." To do so requires a thorough-going reexamination of the role of schools in society and a renegotiation of the social contract. In this article, the authors will describe the beginning phases of a new partnership for urban teacher preparation between a university teacher education program and a non-profit, youth and community development organization that is exploring how to prepare new urban teachers to be public professionals.