Teacher Preparation and Inner-City Schools: Sustaining Educational Failure

Abstract

This article argues that the great majority of teacher education programs have become a sustaining part of urban education's cycle of failure, in particular through the values, stereotypes, and curricular and pedagogical patterns that teacher education inculcates in incipient teachers about difference, minorities, and urban schools and communities. Teacher education's capability lies chiefly in how it understands and treats programmatic minority students, how it encourages a negative perception of urban teaching itself, and how it discourages its students from understanding difference and diversity through the use of an assimilatory multiculturalism, leaving its students stereotypically uninterested in and/or unprepared for urban teaching.