Selecting and Preparing Urban Teachers

Martin Haberman

Martin Haberman - Three thousand youth drop out of school everyday. The achievement gaps between racial groups and economic classes continues to widen. The persistent shortage of teachers who can be effective in 120 failing urban school systems guarantees that the miseducation of seven million diverse children in urban poverty will continue.

Selecting and Preparing Urban Teachers

Martin Haberman
Distinguished Professor
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

Seven thousand youth drop out of school everyday. The achievement gaps between racial groups and economic classes continues to widen. The persistent shortage of teachers who can be effective in 120 failing urban school systems guarantees that the miseducation of seven million diverse children in urban poverty will continue. Traditional university based teacher education has demonstrated for over half a century that it cannot provide teachers who will be effective and who will remain in these schools for longer than brief periods. Recruiting and preparing teachers for the real world will require teacher educations programs to focus on selecting mature, diverse adults who can be prepared on-the-job as teachers of record with the help of mentors and with access to technological support. These teacher education programs cannot claim that the negative conditions of work in urban schools must first be improved before they can be held accountable for providing competent teachers for diverse students in poverty. The likelihood is that these failing school systems will get even worse as they continue to miseducate current and future generations. Since the models for preparing effective teachers for diverse children in poverty already exist they can and should be replicated now. This chapter focuses on this promise.

What Attracts People to Teaching?

It is now typical for Americans to change jobs and career paths throughout their working lives. The old paradigm of school-to-work in which individuals were trained for one job or career which they then pursued for a lifetime is long gone. The new paradigm is an iteration of school-to-work-to-school-to-work-to-school-to-work as people require constant retraining for new roles and careers. While much has been written about this new pattern of individuals moving through many jobs and roles over a lifetime, the emphasis of this literature is top-down and external: it deals with how economic forces demand that individuals retool themselves for the global information age. (Humphrey & Wechsler,2004). While these demands are real and accelerating, the fact is that adults also respond to internal needs as they move through the stages of adult development. What a 20-year old thinks is a satisfying job, reflects a different set of needs and expectations than what a 35 or 50 year old regards as a satisfying job. In spite of denigrating terms such as “job changers, retreads and career switchers, (Stoddard & Floden,1995) mature individuals seeking new roles and careers in teaching is a predictable, natural, desirable response to maturation and development. Indeed, it is a healthy response. Those who are comfortable in precisely the same jobs at age 60 that they held at age 20 are fixated in a pattern of non-growth.(Heath,1977). While American society is clearly the most flexible in allowing and supporting shifts in life choices, there are, nevertheless, both reasonable limits as well as unfortunate rigidities controlling the options open to people. If an individual decides at age 20 that repairing motorcycles is an awesome job, it will be easier for him/her to start a technical career at age 30 than it will be to become a psychiatrist. Similarly, the individual at age 20 who is motivated to become a kindergarten teacher might find it easier at age 35 to develop a chain of daycare centers than to become a veterinarian.

People are driven to search for meaning at all life stages (Bronoski,1971;Frankl,1984); but what seems meaningful to them changes markedly in succeeding stages of maturity. And even in the world's most open society, the constraints and limits placed on individuals become harder to overcome as they mature and take on greater responsibilities. In the end, the choice of a job or career is a compromise between what the individual in a particular life stage wants with what he or she perceives as a realistic option. Many who have analyzed the young adult stage of life characterize it as the age of meness in which the focus is on self. In contrast, middle adulthood can be characterized as a time when many desire to put meaning in their lives by helping others find meaning in theirs.(Erikson,1966). As adults shift from a focus on self to more social concerns, they are motivated to reconsider their job and life opportunities. Many careers such as law, medicine and public administration provide opportunities for helping others but require long periods of expensive preparation. Other jobs, in the health and human service sectors, offer the opportunity to serve others after relatively brief periods of training. Many adults pose the question to themselves in this way: "What can I do that will put more meaning in my life by helping others, without making my own family suffer from my becoming a student again with no income or health insurance?" For many the answer to this question is becoming a teacher through a program of paid, insured, on-the-job training.

ATTRIBUTES OF URBAN TEACHERS

While the search for meaning is the primary attraction of teaching to mature adults, there is a set of background factors which are predictive of what kind of people will be effective and remain in schools serving diverse students in poverty. Many who can become effective teachers will not have all of these attributes but the population of mature adults who become effective and remain in these classrooms tend to have many of the following characteristics. They

- live in or were raised in a metropolitan area.
- attended schools in a metropolitan area as a child or youth.
- are parents or have had life experiences which involved extensive relationships with children.
- are African American, Latino, members of a minority group, or from a working class white family.
- earned a bachelors degree from other than a highly selective or elitist college; many started in community colleges.
- majored in a field other than education as undergraduates.
- have had extensive and varied work experiences before seeking to become teachers.
- are part of a family/church/ethnic community in which teaching is still regarded as a fairly high-status career.
- have experienced a period of living in poverty or have the capacity to empathize with the challenges of living in poverty.
- have had out-of-school experiences with children of diverse backgrounds.
- may have had military experience but not as an officer.
- live in the city or would have no objection to moving into the city to meet a residency requirement.
- have engaged in paid or volunteer activities with diverse children in poverty.
- can multitask and do several things simultaneously and quickly for extended periods such as parenting and working part time jobs.

The aforementioned attributes do not guarantee success as an urban teacher; they raise the probability that individuals with these attributes will succeed and remain. The reverse of these attributes describes a pool of people who are unlikely to remain in poverty schools. Unfortunately, many districts still recruit and hire only the traditional pool: (i.e. middle class, white, monolingual, late adolescent females who graduated from suburban, small town and parochial schools, who were full-time undergraduate majors in education, with little or no work or life experiences, without families or child-rearing experience, who lack commitment or roots in the particular urban area). Again, all of these characteristics are not required but having a cluster of them is typical of individuals who succeed and stay in urban schools. Nonetheless, these attributes describe “the best and the brightest” population for teaching diverse students in poverty.

While teaching will remain a predominantly female career, more mature males can and should be recruited and prepared. As with females, the most powerful predictor is age; as more mature males are recruited, the number who succeed and remain increases substantially. In addition to the characteristics outlined above the males who succeed in urban teaching need nine additional attributes. They are willing and able to:

- multi-task and perform several functions simultaneously.
- work in feminine institutions where procedures and human relationships with other adults are of greater importance than outcomes.
- take directions and accept evaluations from female principals and female supervisors.
- implement criticism not stated as direct orders but as suggestions or concerns.
- spend a good part of every day encouraging and nurturing children and youth as well as teaching them.
- interact positively with mothers and female care-givers.
- maintain class control by motivating and relating to children rather than trying to dominate them.
- regard children's misbehavior as a professional problem to be resolved rather than a threat to their authority or manliness.
- make personal sacrifices of time and energy to meet students' needs.

Men with all or most of these attributes succeed as urban teachers. They are men who are able to understand and overcome the way males are typically socialized in our society. In all teacher education programs a higher percentage of males than females quit or fail but by selecting men who have the nine additional attributes cited above, the programs I have developed over the past forty six years have produced as many as one-third male graduates.