Tailoring New Urban Teachers for Character and Activism

The Context of Urban Teaching and Urban Teacher Preparation

Confirming Levine’s concerns about university-based teacher preparation programs (Levine, 2006), district leaders in Chicago and Boston express reluctance to solely rely on traditionally trained new teachers to effectively meet the challenges of teaching in urban schools (Reville & Coggins, 2007, p. 115; Sanford, 2007; J. Solomon, 2007). The growth of alternative teacher preparation programs and fast-tracked pathways to the urban classroom indicate central office administrators’ interest in nontraditional teaching candidates they believe possess valuable life and work experience, high-quality academic training, and appropriate motivation to seek positions in urban classrooms. This interest appears to be intensifying despite research indicating that alternative teacher training programs exhibit isomorphic tendencies to design and implement programs of similar content and structure, especially in the teaching of math and reading methods (D. Boyd et al., 2006, 2008). One superintendent in this study, Boston’s then-superintendent Thomas Payzant, voiced this trend in 2001 by announcing not only his interest in alternative teacher preparation but his intention for the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to go into competition with university teacher education programs (J. Solomon, 2007), creating the Boston Teacher Residency, one of the two urban teacher residencies examined in this study.

District reformers seek alternative teacher preparation pathways because of the unique challenges inherent in urban teaching (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Keiser, 2005; Michelli & Keiser, 2005; P. Solomon & Sekayi, 2007; Young, 2007). These challenges extend from the classroom to the broader context of culture, ethnicity, economics, politics, policies, history, and race. This study was positioned on two touchstones within the context of urban teaching: the impact of educational bureaucracies and the instructional implications of the teacher-student diversity gap.

Bureaucracies. Urban schools are unique because they educate large numbers of poor students from diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. Given the concentration of low-income minority students in cities such as Chicago and Boson, urban educators carry a particularly keen responsibility to assure equitable and just learning experiences for all students. The size of an urban district, including the numbers of students, teachers, and schools, along with its funding needs and external regulatory pressures create complex systems of management and governance (Payne, 2008; Weiner, 2006) that do not always act in the best interests of students. Large central offices, loosely coupled (Weick, 1976), can become chaotic and unresponsive bureaucracies motivated by self-interest and political expediency. Urban school bureaucracies can hinder equitable and just instruction; school actors can become the machinery of school reformers, uncritically participating in the adoption of curricula and pedagogy that do not fit the needs of inner-city students and families (P. Solomon & Sekayi, 2007, p. 107). School practices, such as class assignments and tracking, can discriminate on the basis of race and economics (Oakes, 2005). In a setting defined by economic and social inequities common to concentrations of poor and minority populations, large central offices lacking a coherent educational agenda can be vulnerable to market forces and radical reforms dictating the learning content and processes of school, ensuring the reproduction of social, economic, and political stratification (P. Solomon & Sekayi, 2007) instead of increasing students’ mobility and expanding their engagement in democratic practices.

The diversity gap. Large urban districts, such as Chicago and Boston, evidence a diversity gap between predominantly White, middle-class teachers and their diverse, low-income, urban students (Zumwalt & Craig, 2008). The central assumption of the diversity gap is that the race and ethnicity of an urban teacher matter to the effectiveness of instruction (Howard & Aleman, 2008). The concern with a homogeneous workforce teaching an increasingly diverse student population is that teachers do not have the necessary knowledge of student backgrounds or exhibit “cultural competence” (Banks et al., 2005, p. 236). Specifically, White teachers may bring attitudes and experiences that can lead to low expectations for students, the perpetuation of deficit thinking, the urge to rescue students from poverty conditions, or the disproportionate referral of low-income students of color to special education (Sleeter, 2008, p. 559). Table 1 illustrates the demographic makeup of students and teachers in Chicago and Boston. The diversity gap between White teachers and non-White students in Boston is particularly relevant to the findings discussed later.

Middle-class teachers who live outside the city can have a limited perspective on their students (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 2004), preventing productive relationships with parents, dismissing them as too poor and uneducated to have relevant knowledge about their children’s educational needs, and elevating the teacher as the educational expert (Weiner, 2006, p. 28).

Purpose, Questions, and Limitations

This study examined two urban teacher residencies, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) in Chicago and the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR). These programs provided central office administrators a source of new teachers from outside the traditional, university-based teacher education programs and fast-track, short-term programs, such as Teach for America. The study explored the phenomenon of district reform partners’ “tailoring” new urban teachers to meet the varying definitions of teacher quality active in each district. Furthermore, the investigation sought to understand why these definitions, grounded in character and activist dispositions, arose within the unique organizational structures and funding arrangements of each partnership.

This investigation asked two questions: What did “teacher quality” mean to the district reform partners? and How did the organizational structure of the reform partnerships influence those meanings? Because AUSL and BTR were private, alternative teacher preparation programs designed to improve teacher quality and increase instructional capacity in difficult-to-staff urban classrooms, it was important to know what reformers meant by teacher quality and the role these meanings played in the preparation of new teachers for urban schools. Since AUSL and BTR worked in partnership with central office leaders, and because future district-residency partnerships are likely to be formed, given support from President Barack Obama, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan,1 it was necessary to learn how those partnerships were structured and whether and how those relationships influenced constructions of teacher quality.

The study recognized several limitations. It did not examine effects of the program on teacher retention. While the residencies published teacher retention rates at 95% or higher at the time of this study, 2007–2008, this statistic must be considered in light of the multiyear commitments residents made and the financial incentive programs residents enjoyed for their first 3 to 5 years on the job. These incentives included loan forgiveness of the residency program and graduate study. Since the programs started in 2001 and 2003, many residency graduates were still working as teachers of record under their incentive program at the time of this study, making the 95% retention figures conditional on active commitments and incentives. When sufficient numbers of program graduates have met their multiyear commitment and received their incentives, a follow-up study on retention will provide more useful data regarding the effects of district-run teacher training on teacher retention. Current retention rates published by the residencies are 83% for AUSL and 90% BTR (AUSL, 2009; BTR, 2009).

Regarding the effect of urban teacher residencies on student learning outcomes, AUSL and BTR did not keep data on student outcomes associated with their teacher graduates. Since cohorts of AUSL and BTR teachers would be assigned to district schools each year, and those teachers may transfer among district schools after their 1st year, the impact of residency-trained teachers on specific student achievement was an important but nonviable research inquiry, given the scope of this study.2

The study focused on the partnerships formed by the districts and urban teacher residencies. It closely examined how those partnerships constructed meanings of teacher quality and how and why their organizational structures may have influenced their constructions. This was the first empirical study to map the partnerships and funding arrangements and link those structures to constructions of teacher quality. The study, however, did not provide an exhaustive description of the residency programs, their curricula, and the demographic data and qualifications of the residency staff, mentor teachers, university instructors, or teaching residents. Further examination of these areas of the district-residency partnership will be essential toward understanding the effect of urban teacher residencies on student learning.

Literature

This study builds on three lines of inquiry. The first looks at mayoral control of urban schools. Both districts in this study were taken over in the mid-1990s by their current mayors, who maintained stable district leadership. The second area of research looks at the district central office as an agent of instructional reform. In Chicago and Boston, the mayorally appointed superintendents initiated and encouraged the experimental reformers to alternatively train their own teachers in response to the problems they perceived as the teacher quality gap. The third area of literature focuses on professional dispositions as a central component in urban teacher preparation. The participants in each case placed great emphasis on character and activist dispositions central to their constructions of urban teacher quality.

Mayoral control. Mayoral control of urban school districts (Chambers, 2006; Cuban & Usdan, 2003; Kirst, 2002; Vitaritti, 2009; Wong & Shen, 2003; Wong, Shen, Anagnostopoulos, & Rutledge, 2007) moves the operation and governance of a city’s school system under the control of a mayor and his or her appointed superintendents and school board members. Mayoral control is implemented through a variety of legal arrangements determined by the state and has gained popularity since the early 1990s, with takeovers of districts, for example, in Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. Advocates cite several advantages of the reform: Moving school district operation into the mayor’s office creates “integrated governance” in which mayoral politics synthesize with school district performance, resulting in a consolidation of power and responsibility (Wong & Shen, 2003). Takeovers allow mayors to install systemwide standards and rely on those standards to hold schools and students accountable for performance (Vitaritti, 2009; Wong et al., 2007). Through elections, mayors are held responsible for the success or failure of a school system, while his or her appointed district officials remain buffered from public accountability, free to design and implement dramatic and untested reforms. The potential for improved schools under mayoral control may spur economic development and attract and retain more middle-class residents while forming a closer alliance between city government and business (Kirst, 2002). Mayoral take-overs potentially address prolonged district dysfunction characterized by leadership and management problems, the inability or unwillingness of school boards to respond to problems, and the politicization of school governance through factionalism (Green & Carl, 2000).

Mayoral control, however, disenfranchises voters who wish to elect their school board representatives. The protection and buffering of superintendents and school boards provide uncertain accountability mechanisms, save for the election cycle. With mayors, superintendents, and school board members acting in concert, the reform creates a potential barrier to citizens demanding a voice in school governance and changes in school policies. Placing the control of an urban district in the office of the mayor changes the politics of elected school boards but may not remove politics from district governance.

Mayoral control operates on assumptions. One accepts that mayors are qualified to run large and complicated school systems with complex and contested public goals. A second believes management strategies that work for businesses also work for schools. A third expects school actors and services to integrate into existing city systems well enough to provide services more efficiently and effectively than prior to the takeover.

Mayoral takeovers occur most frequently in districts with a majority of poor and minority student populations. Takeovers can be perceived as attempts by White political elites to deny minority self-governance of schools; they can also assume a rescuing mission to override previously dysfunctional and unjust governance and management actors. Kirst (2002) observes that appointed school boards result in less democracy and representation of underrepresented and disadvantaged regions of a city. When mayors are in control of schools, they are also in control of the criteria used to determine school failure and low student achievement. Most often, this criterion is the high-stakes test, subject to bias when used with poor minority populations (Nichols & Berliner, 2005). Urban districts under mayoral control exercise considerable discretion and support for dramatic, instructional reform. Buffered from public accountability, district central office leaders and their private partners can become agents of change.

District-level reform. The district reform literature studies how education actors initiate instructional reforms (Cuban & Usdan, 2003; Elmore & Burney, 1997; Hightower, Knapp, Marsh, & McLaughlin, 2002; Marsh et. al, 2005; Rorrer, Skrla, & Scheurich, 2008). Research has looked at how the central office administrator’s ability to grasp the theories and function of new curricula, for example, impact the implementation of curricular reforms (Spillane, 2000). Researchers examine how central office leaders gather and interpret data (Coburn, Honig, & Stein, in press; Coburn & Talbert, 2006; Coburn, Toure, & Yamashita, 2009; Honig & Coburn, 2008) and how districts function as learning communities (Honig, 2007; Stein & Coburn, 2007). As districts increasingly partner with private actors to design and implement reforms, the literature examining private partners becomes relevant to the district reform literature. Studies consider how districts respond to accountability pressures by forming entrepreneurial partnerships with the private sector (W. Boyd, 2007; Bulkley, 2007; Burch, Steinberg, & Donovan, 2007; Christman, Gold, & Herrold, 2006; Rhim, 2007). This literature supports the idea that central office leaders, far from being impediments to instructional reform, can mobilize resources and generate political will needed for coherent reform policy implementation.

The mayoral control and district reform literatures are particularly relevant to this study. They provide context for understanding how mayorally appointed superintendents and their private reform partners co-construct meanings of teacher quality. The literatures also inform the question of how the structures of these partnerships influence meaning making and the districts’ preferences for teacher dispositions.

Professional dispositions in an urban context. Despite the lack of a universally accepted definition of a teacher disposition (Damon, 2007; Murray, 2007), the concept is essential to a study looking at definitions of teacher quality.6 Talbert-Johnson (2006) noted that for too long, colleges of education have admitted students academically capable but with unacceptable dispositions, such as disliking children or avoiding professional collaboration. For the participants in this study, teacher dispositions were meaningful and important to the selection of teaching candidates and their preparation as new urban teachers.

Several viable definitions of dispositions have been offered in the literature (Burant, Chubbick, & Whipp, 2007; Diez, 2007; Diez & Raths, 2007; Helm, 2006; Johnson & Reiman, 2007; Talbert-Johnson, 2006). Teacher dispositions are attributed characteristics that represent dominant and preferred trends in a teacher’s interpretations, judgments, and actions in contexts without obvious solutions (Oja & Reiman, 2007). Informed by skills and knowledge, dispositions account for why teachers act in particular ways under particular circumstances (Villegas, 2007). Raths (2001) suggests that dispositions are a more useful concept than beliefs because beliefs cannot be changed; however, dispositions can be taught as well as changed and assessed because of their direct connections to skills and practices. Professional dispositions can be considered the professional virtues, qualities, and habits of mind and behavior held and developed by teachers on the basis of their knowledge, understanding, and commitments to students, families, colleagues, and communities (Sockett, 2006). Intrinsic dispositions are made manifest through verbal and behavioral messages created during teaching (Breese & Nawrocki-Chabin, 2007).

Haberman’s research is relevant to this study in two ways. He provides a rationale for training specifically urban teachers with a unique set of issues and challenges (Haberman, 1996). He makes the case that there is a distinct urban teacher quality and that traditional teacher education programs are ineffective at recruiting, selecting, and preparing “star” teachers, those individuals who have the personal attributes necessary to effectively teach low-income, diverse students (Haberman, 1995c). Haberman places special emphasis on the selection process of candidates over their actual training (Haberman, 1995b, 1996; McKinney, Haberman, Stafford-Johnson, & Robinson, 2008). These teachers are ideally college degree–holding African Americans with real-world, urban experiences but can also include candidates from any ethnicity and background who have life experience and maturity beyond their college years and who prefer to learn through on-the-job training (Haberman, 1999).

Haberman also expands the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education’s set of skills, knowledge, and dispositions for teacher quality by identifying 14 professional teacher attributes essential to effective urban teaching (Haberman, 1995c). While he does not name these specifically as teacher dispositions and instead qualifies them “mid-range” between personality attributes and discrete behaviors (Haberman, 1995b), several correspond with the teacher dispositions evident in this study. For example, Haberman’s (1995a, 1995b) list includes persistence, high expectations for urban poor students, personal responsibility for student learning, and independence.

Conceptual Framework

The study’s conceptual framework embeds the mayorally controlled school district in an urban regime. Urban regime analysis (Bulkley, 2007; Mossberger & Stoker, 2001; Shipps, 2003; Stone, 2005) describes coalitions of business, civic, and governmental organizations aligning in relationships, consolidating a city’s once-fragmented power, and maturing into a regime of formal and informal governance relationships over time. This transformation of temporary coalitions into semipermanent governing and political structures is catalyzed by a common purpose, for example, goals to achieve, problems to solve, or threats to deflect. In the case of the Chicago and Boston school systems, this tendency toward formal and informal consolidation of power resulted in the recentralization of school governance, a citywide curriculum, and the concentration of educational accountability on one mayor. Urban regime analysis is a wide lens through which to examine how mayors address problems such as teacher turnover, teacher preparation, and the achievement gap. Urban regimes explain how such problems catalyze mayors, their appointed school boards and superintendents, corporate and civic interest groups, and city lawmakers to remove legal and political obstacles and leverage influence in order to empower districts to design and implement dramatic reforms within election cycles.

Stone (1998) argues that policy change comes about only if reformers establish a new set of political arrangements commensurate with the policy being advanced (p. 9). Urban regime analysis recognizes that community-wide issues, such as education reform, occur in a context of local politics and fluid, agenda-specific coalitions (Stone, 1998). Urban regime analysis clarifies who has power in a particular context and how those with power work together to further policy agendas (Bulkley, 2007). The literature distinguishes between electoral authority and actual governing power created through political structures referred to as “arrangements” (Shipps, 2003), which create coalitions of diverse groups in order to address unique problems (Stone, 1998). Because they are stable and can be long-lived across several city administrations, or in the cases of Chicago and Boston, across a decade-long administration of a single mayor, urban regimes synthesize previously dispersed power (Mossberger & Stoker, 2001) into lasting governing structures whose reforms, such as district-run, alternative urban teacher preparation, can be speedily designed and implemented within an election cycle.

Urban regime analysis is a useful lens through which to study the politics, players, and policy issues on a citywide level. Urban regime analysis is too wide, however, to examine the details of how and why Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and BPS partnered with their urban teacher residencies to tailor their own teachers and construct their own notions of teacher quality. At the organization-to-organization level, the study’s conceptual framework uses a bridging analysis informed by resource dependence theory to describe how the district actors structured their partnerships. Resource dependence theory (B. Boyd, 1990; B. Johnson, 1995; Pfeffer & Salancik, 2003; Selznick, 1949; Scott & Davis, 2007) explains how organizations enter into dependent relationships in order to acquire the scarce resources they lack but nevertheless need to achieve goals and fulfill needs. The districts in this study partnered with urban teacher residencies in order to create a specially trained teacher workforce committed to remaining in the district’s most-difficult-to-staff classrooms. These district arrangements, partially funded by private and corporate interests, exhibited a partnership bridge that structured decision making and placed private funding in varying proximities of the teacher preparation programs.

Figure 1 illustrates how the mayors and districts in Chicago and Boston established partnerships to accomplish their goal to increase instructional capacity. The two-way arrow indicates the partnership bridge—the exchange of resources that met the needs of both the district for instructional capacities and the residency for legitimacy as a system actor (Scott & Davis, 2007). The dotted line around the district indicates the semipermeable organizational boundary needed to establish and maintain the partnership bridge.

This framework provides a conceptual lens through which to examine both the citywide regime politics and the district-residency partnership created by reformers to increase instructional capacity and address the problems associated with the teacher quality gap.

Similar Knowledges and Skills but Varying Dispositions

One research question sought to elicit participants’ constructions of teacher quality in district-run, alternative teacher preparation programs. All participants were asked, “What does teacher quality mean to you?” Participants in both cases identified similar sets of knowledges and skills considered essential to teaching in an urban context (illustrated in Figure 2). AUSL and BTR curricula focused on teacher knowledge of content areas, planning and assessment, pedagogy, and child psychology through their course work and classroom-based experiences. For example, elementary teaching residents in both programs focused on mastering the knowledges necessary for teaching reading, writing, and math as well as science and social studies. Middle and secondary residents in both programs saw their content areas narrow for specialization in the traditional subjects. Both programs had course work in child development. One difference in knowledges between the residencies, driven by a request from the central office in Boston, was that all BTR residents became dually certified in special education as well as their instructional area.

In addition to content knowledge, both residency programs taught and assessed for similar professional skills. These included classroom management and discipline and problem solving. They also included the skill of reflective practice—the self-examination of a teacher’s decisions and actions in the classroom.8 This similarity of skills was not surprising because both residencies operated similar programs: preservice course work, a yearlong mentorship in an urban classroom, personal coaching, and graduate course work in pedagogy and content. Both programs led to a master’s degree in teaching through an accredited university as well as state licensure.

Much of the participants’ responses, however, focused on teacher dispositions. Both cases identified high expectations as essential for teaching low-income, disadvantaged students. BPS central office administrator Sonja Brookins Santelises, deputy superintendent for teaching and learning, commented, “You need people who cannot only work with those children, but who can do so rejecting a deficit model.” Timothy Knowles, former BPS deputy superintendent for teaching and learning, one of the founding influences on the formation and early years of the BTR, and now director of the Urban Reform Institute in Chicago, put expectations in an urban context:

I think there’s a great deal of evidence in the educational domain that expectations really matter. . . . They’ve got to be backed up with pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge, but there are many people who can teach and know the content but have incredibly low expectations for the kids they serve and the kids don’t get very far.

While the having of high expectations was the one disposition all participants included in their definitions of teacher quality, the reformers preferred varying types of dispositions, despite the similarity of their programs and urban contexts. Chicago participants frequently talked about dispositions that reflected strong character, for example, individual accountability and perseverance. These dispositions were rooted in the belief that the successful teacher in Chicago needed character dispositions such as independence, courage, resourcefulness, personal integrity, stamina, and responsibility to meet the challenges in difficult-to-staff classrooms (Haberman, 1995c). In contrast to the Chicago participants’ assessment of character dispositions, Boston participants frequently identified activist dispositions, specifically, race awareness and teaching for social justice. These activist dispositions were rooted in a belief that to be a successful teacher in Boston meant confronting discrimination and injustice based on race and class, incorporating a critical perspective and culturally responsive curriculum into everyday teaching, and practicing teaching as an act of social change. Figure 2 categorizes the teacher quality findings evident in the study and differentiates the varying dispositions identified in each district-residency partnership.

Character dispositions in Chicago. Participants in Chicago considered the teacher’s personal accountability for each child’s success a component of teacher quality. Lionel Allen, principal of the Sherman School of Excellence in Chicago, assessed personal accountability during candidate interviews:

One of the interview questions that I ask is, “What in your opinion is one of the predominant factors in the achievement gap?” And if people start saying, “Oh, it’s poverty” or “It’s the parents” . . . if they start saying all those things and they never come back to the quality of the adult in the classroom, then that’s not the kind of person I want to have here.

An AUSL resident observed, “Teacher quality is someone who . . . doesn’t stop, even when it doesn’t go the way you think it’s going to go. So when you have a bad day, you always think, ‘Okay, how can I make this better?”’ This resident held herself accountable for an ineffective lesson, as a default explanation, even when external conditions may have hindered student performance or otherwise prevented the successful implementation of a sound lesson plan.

Another character disposition evidenced in the Chicago data was perseverance. While it suggests an action, perseverance is a disposition because it is the inclination to keep a commitment or achieve a goal. Participants in Chicago recognized that for the AUSL program to fulfill its mission to improve instructional quality, teachers needed to remain on the job in the most difficult classrooms and persist through challenging situations and conditions. Jarvis Sanford, AUSL leader and principal of Dodge Renaissance Academy, an AUSL-run school and training academy, described teachers who lacked perseverance:

It takes a unique individual. [Before the turnaround at] Harvard,9 17, in one day 17 teachers were absent. That tells you a number of different things. That tells you that those people just didn’t give a damn about their students. And that they lack quality as educators. But it also tells you something else. It tells you that it’s a hard community to work in, that 17 folk woke up and said, “Oh my God, I can’t do this.”

The participants in Chicago talked of personal accountability and perseverance as examples of strong character. These dispositions tracked closely with Haberman’s (1995b) attributes of “star” teachers in poverty schools. Given the similarities of knowledges and skills and the common program components shared by both residencies, the data in Boston produced a surprising finding.

Activist dispositions in Boston. The participants in Boston identified activist dispositions considered essential to effective urban teaching. Activist dispositions indicated a teacher’s intention to see teaching as an action for social change and justice. The activist dispositions evidenced in the Boston data included a critical race awareness and teaching for social justice.

Race awareness was a disposition indicating a teacher’s inclination to be attentive to matters of race, ethnicity, and culture. Boston’s mostly Black and Hispanic student population was taught by a majority White staff (see Table 1). The city’s troubled experience with forced busing in the 1970s (Nelson, 2005) was evident in participant interviews. BPS has seen little meaningful reduction of the Black-White achievement gap, and the district struggles to maintain a 25% African American representation among teachers, a percentage decreed by the same court order that instituted forced integration within the city. During interviews in Chicago, race awareness was rarely mentioned as an issue pertinent to teacher preparation. In contrast, race was raised by most of the Boston participants without prompting.

Jesse Solomon, director of the BTR and former BPS classroom teacher, spoke about the importance of a teacher’s critical awareness of race in the Boston classroom: “Obviously we’re a town with a complicated history of issues of race and class. . . . I believe that you cannot be an effective teacher in Boston without really grappling with issues—particularly of race and ethnicity.” For Solomon, the successful Boston teacher must be disposed toward openly addressing his or her own race as well as the races of students, acknowledging that it is an issue that affects teaching and learning. He went on to comment,

We try to be very, very up-front and explicit about that, so that people know that’s what they’re getting into when they come in the program. That we start talking about it on Day 1. So it’s not like we’re going to do a piece on race, but those are issues that pervade everything you do. So, we’re talking about it in your math methods course; it’s not like you can separate race from what it means to teach math. . . . We always try to be a little more than 50% folks of color; you’re in a group that truly is diverse. And for many people, this is one of the first times they’ve been in a group like that. . . . So, for a lot of White people, they’re used to always being in the majority, so what does it mean to not be in the majority in a situation? For a lot of folks of color, especially in Boston, they’re used to always being in the minority in a room, in a professional situation. What does it mean to be in a professional situation where they’re not? What does it mean to just have issues of race put on the table? That pushes some people out of their comfort zone.

Participants in Boston also emphasized the disposition toward teaching for social justice, attending to issues of class, gender, power, and equality in the classroom. Teaching with an inclination toward addressing injustices in society is an activist stance, implying that a key purpose of school—and of urban teacher preparation—is to effect social change. A BTR resident described the context in which a teacher’s disposition toward social justice could lead to social change:

I think . . . a quality teacher is somebody who . . . wants to actually make a difference. . . . For me, it’s really a commitment to students, a commitment to social justice; it’s somebody who truly believes that. One of the things that we say is that teaching is an act of revolution. And it’s got to be somebody who is there to make a change. Not just because you want this person to graduate. It’s got to be somebody who believes that by teaching students, you are empowering them.

BTR’s emphasis on social justice as a teacher disposition was designed to have a systemwide impact as residency graduates spread out into district schools. A BPS administrator observed,

It’s [BTR] heads and tails above what most university preparation programs can offer. Obviously, they are in our schools on more than just a short couple months’ practicum, but in our schools for a year. They are working with our best teachers. They are learning our curriculum. There’s a really strong social justice component to the BTR curriculum which I think comes through in their kind of commitment to urban education.

The variation of character and activist dispositions arose from an inquiry into constructions participants created for the concept of teacher quality. A second question sought to learn what accounted for this variation in light of the similarities of the residency programs. The conceptual framework blending urban regime analysis and resource dependence theory proved a useful lens for seeing the potential influence the organizational structures and funding arrangements had on the substance and variation of teacher dispositions emphasized by actors in each case site. The study’s second finding is descriptive and explanatory in the context of a qualitative case study (Maxwell, 2004; Yin, 2003).

The Partnership Structures and Proximity of Private Funding

Before considering the question of why the cases varied in preferred dispositions, it was necessary to map the district-residency partnerships and understand the structure of their relationships and their sources of funding. Figure 3 illustrates the partnership maps and locates the sources of private funding at varying proximities to the core of the teacher education component of each residency. The Chicago partnership map describes AUSL’s relationship with CPS; not only was the residency a provider of much-needed instructional capacity through its urban teacher residency program, but AUSL also was a contracted educational management organization (EMO). The figure indicates that AUSL operated reconstituted district schools. Specifically, AUSL operated six schools at the time of this study, some as teacher training academies and two, Sherman and Harvard Schools of Excellence, as “turnaround” reconstitutions—schools closed in June and reopened in September with all new faculty and staff supplied, hired, and supervised by AUSL.

As a private, nonprofit organization governed by a board of trustees representing corporations, local businesses, civic entities, and education institutions, AUSL relied on private donors to fund its residency program as well as supplement CPS funds for the turnaround and management of reconstituted schools. The grayed box with dollar signs in the CPS portion of the figure depicts private and corporate interests, such as the Dell, Gates, Motorola, and MetLife foundations, as well as local businesses that donate directly to the tax-exempt, nonprofit AUSL.

Linking the Chicago findings back to the conceptual framework, CPS, as a regime actor with full support of the mayor, bridged with AUSL for resources it needed to reduce new teacher turnover, increase instructional capacity, and manage schools the district deemed failures. AUSL met district goals by selecting and training teachers who, in addition to acquiring the necessary academic knowledges and methodological skills, also possessed the character dispositions deemed crucial to effective urban instruction. The partnership bridge also served AUSL by legitimizing it as a regime actor and by expanding its mission from teacher preparation to EMO implementing turnaround reconstitutions of the city’s lowest-performing schools. This dual reform, intended to meet the district’s needs for improved new teacher retention and privatized management of underperforming schools, was unique among urban regimes with mayoral control of schools.

The Boston partnership map on the right side of Figure 3 illustrates a very different set of relationship structures and funding arrangements from Chicago. Most importantly, BTR was positioned inside and outside the district, a design, according to Jesse Solomon, with “one foot in and one foot out” of the district. This legitimized BTR as a district program with partial district funding and accountability; however, it also provided for its autonomy of program through a three-way collaboration with BPS, BTR, and the private, nonprofit Boston Plan for Excellence (BPE), a philanthropic and research organization dedicated to school improvement in the city. This position in and out of the district was designed by then-superintendent Thomas Payzant and the residency founders to protect BTR from the political and financial vulnerabilities of being, as Ellen Guiney, director of BPE, described, “just another” district program. The relationship arrows in the figure indicate that while a memorandum of understanding existed to create the official relationship among the organizations, much of the BPS-BTR-BPE relationship and functioning was developed collaboratively over time.

BTR’s funding arrangements tracked with the founders’ intention to design the residency as a public-private hybrid. At first, BTR’s residency program was mostly funded by private and corporate donors, depicted by the grayed box with the dollar signs. Over time, the founders arranged to have the residency’s funding shared evenly between private donations and public money. Ultimately, funding for half of BTR’s operations came from district funds as a budget line item. Unlike AUSL, which received private funds directly, BTR’s private funds from national foundations and local businesses were buffered through BPE and its philanthropic partners.

Linking the Boston findings back to the conceptual framework, BPS, as an urban regime system actor under longtime and stable mayoral control, initiated the reform to meet its needs to reduce new teacher turnover and increase instructional capacity. The resource-dependent relationship with BTR was designed to help BPS select and train knowledgeable and skilled teachers who would hold certification in special education, increase the number of African American teachers to meet a court-ordered quota, and tailor new teachers who would approach urban instruction with a critical awareness of race and a disposition toward social justice in a city with a complicated racial history.

The partnership map in Figure 3, along with participant interview data and findings summarized in Figure 2, suggest that the organizational structures and funding arrangement in each city were unique and accounted, in part, for the variation in preferred dispositions among reform partners in each case site. Why this might be the case is examined next. This study then concludes with implications for current and future district-urban teacher residency partnerships as planned by the Obama administration.

Implications

The study suggests four implications for policy regarding present and future district-urban teacher residency partnerships. These implications concern the phenomenon of tailoring teachers, the importance of program transparency and accountability, the usefulness in distinguishing a uniquely urban teacher quality, and the need to reexamine of the purpose of urban schooling. These implications are also relevant to researchers preparing to empirically examine urban teacher residencies as a favored reform of the Obama administration as well as of local, state, and federal policymakers who will shape new district-residency partnerships in the future.

Tailoring teachers. District leaders and their private reform partners gained the governing mechanisms, private funding, and political will to tailor their own new teachers, diminishing their reliance on university-based traditional teacher education systems. The reformers appeared to have preferences for varying teacher dispositions. These findings raise a policy question: If mayors and district leaders and private reform entrepreneurs can shape and tailor teachers, whose definition of teacher quality should hold sway? The Chicago dispositions were constructed by district elites. Students, parents, and community members had limited or no input into how the district defined teacher quality and why character dispositions were emphasized over other types. While this is also true of traditional teacher education programs, the issue of voice and input into preferred dispositions is a different matter when public servants are excluding public participation in a function of a public school system. The findings in this study suggest the need to further examine the process of forming meaning around notions of teacher quality for specific urban settings. For example, the notion of local teacher quality is unclear. Would activist dispositions be valuable in Chicago? Are character dispositions relevant in Boston? Might urban teacher quality and the dispositions that define it be more generally evident to all urban settings, as Haberman suggests? Policymakers interested in the tailoring of urban teachers should consider who gets to decide what teacher quality means, upon what basis and with what evidence will those constructions be made, and to what extent those definitions need to be localized in order to best serve the students in that district.

Transparency. Currently, the work, decisions, values, and preferred dispositions of urban teacher residencies are beyond public scrutiny and accountability. Little empirical research has been published on the partnerships or the effectiveness of the teacher tailoring reform. Urban teacher residencies are accountable only to the district leaders, who are accountable only to the mayors, whose own accountability is limited to the election cycle. District-residency partnerships have extraordinary leeway to prepare teachers as they wish. While this can be a liberating and potentially effective reform condition, it also begs for some mechanisms of accountability and public input, especially because these partnerships are educating teachers for public schools with large numbers of poor and minority students. Policymakers should consider whose voices need to be heard that are not being heard now and what mechanisms will assure their participation in the decision-making processes of district-run, privatized teacher preparation.

An urban teacher quality. There may be a distinct urban teacher quality reformers seek to attain through their privatized teacher preparation programs. This means there is a set of identifiable knowledges, skills, and dispositions most effective for instruction in low-income, high-diversity city schools. Currently, state licensure qualifies a teacher to work anywhere in a state; however, it is reasonable to consider the possibility that instruction in extraordinary settings, such as urban schools with high concentrations of poverty, racial diversity, and the physical and psychological issues associated with poverty and discrimination, requires specialized candidate selection and training. If this is the case, accrediting agencies and state and federal policymakers need to examine current guidelines for teacher quality.

The purpose of urban education. Character qualities reflecting free-market influences and activist qualities reflecting critical pedagogy influences point to a fundamental conflict over the purpose of schooling. If urban education is about training a workforce to improve America’s economy and global competitiveness, as the regime rhetoric in Chicago suggests, then perhaps new teachers need to primarily demonstrate dispositions of personal accountability and perseverance. If the purpose of urban education is to empower students to understand diversity and engage in an increasingly non-White democracy, however, then perhaps race awareness and teaching for social justice should define the urban teacher. A blend of these two purposes has been a balance difficult to achieve, and it is unlikely that the nation’s policymakers and local communities will agree, without prompting, on the purpose of urban education. Engagement in a national dialogue about the mission and purpose of urban education could potentially recalibrate teacher education and serve to envision a purpose for schooling in which student learning outcomes and engaged democratic participation need not be exclusive missions or ideological positions of scholars and politicians but, instead, a collective ideal to steer policy.