Earlier this month, a 9-year-old was shot and killed in South Side Chicago. And around this time last year, a Hill District family was burying a son who was shot and killed on his way to school.
Unfortunately, tragedies like these are common for some communities in cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh. They tear families apart, devastate neighborhoods and weigh heavily on the backs of students in urban schools.
Events like these also impact teachers teaching in these communities, many of whom have had little exposure to the kind of violence their students experience every day.
“[Our students’] schools, their communities are impacted by the loss of life,” says Kay Fujiyoshi, an instructor and adviser with the University of Chicago’s Urban Teacher Education Program. “As teachers in this day and age, you don’t fully understand what life is like in the city unless you’re willing to live there and think about what it means to be a community.”
Experts say there is a direct correlation between the poverty and violence in urban communities and the low achievement rates of students in urban schools. And that’s the rationale behind the growing number of urban-teaching programs springing up around the country, including Chicago’s.
“We get our [teaching] students to think about the complexities of urban life,” Fujiyoshi says. “Right now, what we have going on in Chicago is a little too much for me to wrap my head around. What children have to face, what they’re exposed to, all of that is really real and awful.”
The promise of these urban-teaching programs is threefold. In addition to training teachers to meet the needs of students coming from communities plagued by poverty and violence, the mission of these programs is to reduce teacher turnover in urban settings where instructors often get burned out. Additionally, many programs make a point of attracting racially diverse talent in an effort to provide more students with teachers who look like them.
Could such programs be the key to addressing achievement gaps between students from urban and suburban school districts? A group of Pittsburgh education experts seems to think so, and this year Propel charter schools and Chatham University launched the Pittsburgh Urban Teaching Corps.
“Part of Propel’s mission is to be a catalyst for change in public education,” says Randall Bartlett, Propel’s senior director of teacher residency, research, reporting and the arts. “We need to explore and implement new models for teacher education for urban students.
“What really matters in making a difference in the lives of kids in urban schools are the teachers — the people who are there every day, who pour their hearts into this work. And the more ways we can get the right people into schools to work with children, the better we’re going to do as a country.”
Up until now, LaShawn Neal and Esteban Sagastume were traveling on two different career paths. Neal was working in engineering and Sagastume worked in the classroom as a para-professional and classroom therapist. But now, both are among the 10 students in Propel Schools’ first urban-teaching cohort.
“I feel like there’s a need,” says Neal. “You look at stats on achievement gaps, and I feel like there’s a need for good teachers that have a passion for teaching, that aren’t just there to be there, but really want to see urban students succeed. I feel like there’s a need for people who have that passion to make a difference in urban schools.”
Participants in the Pittsburgh Urban Teaching Corps program earn a master’s of arts in teaching degree from Chatham after completing four semesters of course work over one year. (Propel asked Chatham to partner with them on the program.) The program is free and students receive a monthly stipend. Participants also commit to teach in Propel schools for the next three years, where each will receive a starting salary of $40,000.
Their curriculum is centered on culturally responsive teaching, classroom management and, above all, emphasizing the important connection between teacher and community.
Neal and Sagastume began their work with the program in May, taking five courses at Chatham during the summer. Their apprenticeship at Propel schools started in August. Less than three months into his apprenticeship, Sagastume says he’s already starting to grasp what makes urban teaching unique.
“Being an educator goes beyond teaching content,” says Sagastume. “It’s getting to know your students, getting to know their families, knowing what they’re going through at home, understanding what’s going on in that community that may be [impacting] the classroom, that might be coming out in behaviors.
“It’s not that you’re coming here Monday through Friday, 7:30 to 3:30, to teach. You’re invested. And it’s something that this program has got me to think about even more.”
Chatham and Propel believe the apprenticeship component of their program — which places their students in urban classrooms during the first year of the program, while they are simultaneously completing coursework at Chatham — is what will make their teachers successful in the long run.
“Having that direct exposure really provides firsthand experience from day one,” says Tyra Good, assistant professor of education at Chatham. “Sometimes teachers want to go into education, but they don’t realize until they hit the classroom, ‘Oh, this is not what I signed up for. I didn’t think the classroom would be like this.’”
And experts say classroom exposure early on will help ensure teachers in the urban-teachers corps continue to work in urban settings after completing the program.
“We need teachers who are dedicated and passionate, and also stay in urban schools because having consistency and the ability to build and sustain relationships over time is of critical importance for students in urban schools,” says Bartlett, of Propel. “So it’s really important for us to have folks who are going to stay in urban schools and continue to teach and lead.”
In an effort to increase the number of teachers in the program, next year’s new cohort will double to 20 participants and will expand to include certification in secondary education. Applications are being accepted until Dec. 15.
“We wanted to find a way to provide people who were interested in teaching, particularly people from diverse backgrounds, to have an avenue to come learn to be a teacher, get a degree, get certification and then work in our schools,” says Bartlett. “To establish a program where the people who had a passion and the dedication for social justice could go through a one-year intensive program, and then be prepared to work in urban schools.”
Propel’s program isn’t the first urban-teaching program locally. At Indiana University of Pennsylvania, education students have had the opportunity to focus on urban teaching for the past 19 years.
“The very first class they have is about family and community and relationships,” says Shirley Johnson, a professor in IUP’s school of education. “We talk about the demographics and dynamics of urban settings and urban cultures. We know urban settings have challenges like children coming to school having experienced violence, but they are not challenges that cannot be overcome.”
While IUP’s urban-teaching track does not have an apprenticeship component like Propel’s, where students commit to spending four years in an urban school, students do one semester of student-teaching in the Pittsburgh Public School District, at schools including Fulton, Faison, Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Johnson believes this experience benefits the students in her program, who, she says, are predominantly white females coming from suburban communities.
“I believe that many young teacher candidates would consider going into urban settings if they had more meaningful experiences with diversity in general,” Johnson says. “Many times, their experiences are not like the students they’re going to be teaching. So they have had limited experiences with urban settings other than what the media has suggested. We require them to observe in an urban setting to see what it’s like.”
Another teaching program gaining prominence at the national level is Urban Teachers, an organization that trains and places teachers in public and charter schools in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
“Urban school districts are finding that it’s very, very hard to get highly qualified people into the classroom. And when they get them in there, they only stay two years,” says Annette O’Boyce, Urban Teachers’ chief academic officer. “There’s huge teacher turnover. There’s a lot of instability in these schools. So we try to put our candidates in schools in cohorts of at least two or three, so that they can start to not only be a resource for each other, but also bring some stability to the schools.”
According to Urban Teacher, 70 percent of its participants returned for a third year of urban teaching, compared to the 50 percent of public-school teachers nationwide who leave the profession in the first three years. O’Boyce hopes urban-teaching programs like hers and others around the country will break down stereotypes about working with urban students.
“It’s just very problematic that people feel OK to say that an urban school cannot achieve at the same level as other schools,” O’Boyce says. “Part of our very first week is dealing with racism, how to be equitable in the classroom and considering where you come from. There are very serious and very different implications for teaching in an urban school. If we don’t take those on and have honest conversations about what those difficulties are going to be, then we’re really setting people up for failure.”
