The Rationale for Preparing Mature Adults as Teachers of Diverse Children in Urban Poverty

Martin Haberman
Distinguished Professor
U. Wisconsin Milwaukee

Summary

Seven thousand youth drop out of school everyday. The achievement gaps between racial groups and economic classes continues to widen. The persistentshortage 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 provideteachers who will be effective and who will remain in these schools for longer than brief periods. Recruiting and preparing teachers for the real world willrequire teacher educations programs to focus onselecting mature, diverse adults who can be prepared on-the-job as teachers of record with the help of mentors and withaccess to technological support.Recommendationsfor licensure will need to be based on the competencies teacher candidates actually demonstrate, especially their impact onstudents’ learning.

Section I. outlines the background factors of mature adults who are most likely to succeed. The research and theory explaining why more mature adults are the most likely pool of teachers is presented. Section II focuses on the disconnect between quitter/failure teachers and children as the fundamental reason for leaving teaching. Section III summarizes fourteen attributes of effective urban teachers. Section IV explains how more mature teachers maintain high aspirations andoffer a broader curriculum than what is tested for. The life and work experiences of mature adults are analyzed in Section V.in order to explain why they are more likely to prepare students for the world of work. After a review of the most debilitating conditions of urban teaching in Section VI, the issue of how and why more mature teachers are able to cope withschool bureaucracies is presented in Section VII. The final section of the paper offers specific procedures for recruiting and preparing mature adults.

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