Prioritizing Urban Children, Teachers, and Schools through Professional Development Schools - Paperback

by Pia Lindquist Wong (Editor), Ronald David Glass (Editor)

Provides insights into university partnerships with urban schools.

How can we better educate disadvantaged urban students? Drawing on over five years' experience in a broad partnership involving twelve urban professional development schools in five districts, a teachers' union, a comprehensive public university, and several community-based organizations, the contributors to this volume describe how they worked together to help disadvantaged urban students through an innovative professional development program. By networking with educators at different levels and coordinating curriculum projects, they were able to begin overcoming rigid and ineffective mandates and curricula tied to standardized test scores and get through to their students on more meaningful and productive levels. The contributors share their successes and failures with these efforts, as well as insights related to the ethical, political, and academic challenges faced by professional development schools.

Author Biography

Pia Lindquist Wong is Associate Dean of the College of Education at California State University Sacramento and coauthor (with Maria del Pilar O'Cádiz and Carlos Alberto Torres) of Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo. Ronald David Glass is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz.