While Randolph bridles at the criticism heaped almost reflexively on young blacks, she doesn’t blink at what her fifth graders face along South State Street. The housing projects are overrun by gang members. Families are fractured. Drug dealers fire their weapons for terror and sport. But that’s old news; her job is building a new world, even if that means getting between two girls fighting in a hallway. It was the kind of challenge her DePaul instructors had told her to expect. “I went upstairs and almost cried,” she says. “But I’d handled it pretty well. I amazed myself.” And she came back for more the next morning.
Nowhere are the failures of teacher education more sharply focused than in the schools of the inner city. Amid the courses on theory and methods, there’s scant advice about teaching in the midst of gangs, drugs and child abuse. “We’ve really fallen down in the inner, inner city,” says David Imig, chief executive officer of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Not that many prospective teachers have put up much of a fuss: fewer than 10 percent become city teachers, and about half of those quit within three years. Many are baffled when the reality of urban schooling crushes their tidy theoretical models, says University of Washington Education Dean Allen Glenn. “They end up asking, ‘Am I an idiot? Or was my professor a false god?’ "
While both may be true, some teachers colleges have finally started to change their methods. In practice, that means sending prospective teachers into urban classrooms, much as a medical intern is dropped into a bloody emergency room. According to Imig, there are now a dozen programs like DePaul’s that rely on intensive supervision and on-the-job inner-city training.
The keys to the project, says program designer Barbara Radner, are the master teachers who work in the Chicago schools and supervise her interns. Each trainee spends an academic year in one of nine local schools, tutoring pupils or conducting classes much as traditional student teachers typically do for several weeks. But in place of one supervising teacher, teams of up to 10 mentors from each school’s faculty oversee the interns, reporting their progress to DePaul via computer mail. (The students also retreat to campus for basic education lectures on Saturdays and seminars where they can compare their experiences.)
This first class of urban trainees differs from most teachered students at DePaul. They’re older (24 to 52); all had previously earned college degrees in other disciplines, and nine are Peace Corps veterans. Trainees have been screened for their commitment to long careers in public schools and seem blessedly free of naivete about urban teaching environments. That’s a tribute to Radner’s exclusion of what she describes as “white knights-and black knightsout to save the world.”
Radner’s master teachers designed much of the program. Interns study what to teach as well as how, with curriculum ideas rooted in the only place many of their pupils know. Geography students learn about Egypt, but only after mapping their school’s neighborhood in Chicago. U.S. history has as its constant benchmark a time line of Chicago history. And “community math” teaches percentages by having students interview shopkeepers around public-housing projects. Some teaching tips carry life-and-death implications: don’t keep kids after school if they must cross gang turf to get home.
The fledgling teachers are expected to keep order in their classes and run highly structured lessons; in chaotic lives, the schools may be the only stable places the kids know. Many DePaul interns think that their greatest obstacle is the deflated self-esteem of the pupils. “You try to build them up each day and get them learning,” says 25-year-old Mary Maloney, who faced lower hurdles as a Peace Corps teacher in Cameroon. Four interns teach at Gale Community Academy in an immigrant neighborhood so fluid that each year two of every three pupils are new. Pamela Verzannon struggles with the special needs of a child congenitally scarred by cocaine, while her colleague, former Motorola engineer Juan Gonzalez, tries to defuse black-Hispanic hostilities that erupt as early as third grade. Sometimes the job leads beyond the schoolyard. Terrell School intern Yahya Karim persuaded gang members in the notorious Robert Taylor Homes to give safe passage to a sixth grader forced into the housing project when his family’s apartment burned.
For all their successes, DePaul’s teaching interns are also learning lessons in humility. Jose Velazquez, a Chicago middle-school teacher helping to instruct the interns, says they’ve already been stripped of one attitude common among young teachers. “They know better than to say to their students, ‘I was once in your shoes’,” says Velazquez, who has coached the interns on how to react if a student dies by drug overdose. “We were never in their shoes.”
Some experts warn that teacher-education programs can be too heavily rooted in practical experience. “They tend to give less training in diagnosis of learning disabilities and other special problems,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, director of a Columbia University center for restructuring teacher ed. Still, University of Houston professor Robert Houston expects the reality-based internships to produce teachers who will stay longer and perform better. “Too many teachers in inner-city schools have psychologically resigned from the job,” Houston says. “They make pacts with their students: ‘If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you’.”
For DePaul the early returns are encouraging. AT&T, a sponsor of the Urban Teacher Corps, will fund an additional five programs next year. Principal Ede Snyder says she’d like to add all four of her interns to the faculty at Gale, site of a curious ripple effect. Some 20 of the 50 full-time teachers have asked to spend a few Saturdays auditing, without credit or pay, the interns’ urbaned classes. Radner, whose 21 budding teachers need all the help they can get, is delighted to oblige. Already she’s fielding an avalanche of inquiries about next year’s corps. And in the shadow of the Robert Taylor Homes, Yahya Karim is so impressed with the teachers at Terrell that he’s transferred his three children there from their old school in a better neighborhood. Evidently he plans to stay.
