Preparing Teachers for Diversity and High-Poverty Schools: A Research-Based Perspective

Abstract

This chapter focuses on three bodies of research on teacher preparation for diversity and high-poverty schools in the U.S. Although the inference is that these contexts include relatively high numbers of students living in poverty or in very low-income families, few of these studies attended closely to preparing teachers to understand the particular needs of urban, immigrant, or poor learners. Rather, terms such as diverse and urban were relatively unproblematized code language for a constellation of characteristics that describe school populations and schools that have historically not been well-served by the mainstream education system, including traditional teacher preparation programs located at colleges and universities. The first body of research, which was intended to inform policy, focused primarily on determining the effects and effectiveness of human-capital policies and personnel practices regarding alternative certification and preparation as a solution to the problem of teacher shortages in high-poverty and minority schools. The second focused on preparing a predominantly White, middle-class teacher-candidate population for diverse schools, and the third on recruiting students of color into teacher education. The second and third were framed by the growing cultural gap between teachers and their students and were conducted mostly by teacher educators. These studies aimed to produce knowledge to improve the preparation of a culturally responsive teaching force. This chapter compares and contrasts these three lines of research and argues for more research that explicitly focuses on ways to prepare teachers to work with students from poor families and communities.