Post, L., Pugach, M., Hains, A., & Thurman, A. (2002). Multiple points of entry into teaching for urban communities. ERIC Digest. ERICEDRS, 20021201.

Summary of content.

Post, Pugach, Hains, and Thurman give an extensively cited report on P-16 Councils— conglomerates of local stakeholders across a range of institutions whose prime purpose is to find, train, and then license individuals already in the school machinery for inner-city teaching jobs. Though they may be an indirect part of the TESOL image problem, they definitely are also an integral part of a solution to the dilemma of finding and keeping good teachers for urban schools, especially those with increasingly diverse populations. Here is what they report:

The concept of Multiple Entry Points: To form alliances between agencies, institutions, and industries for the purpose of creating a career latice that (a) identifies individuals who have a desire to teach in urban schools, and then (b) collectively helps to move these individuals from one stage of the grid to the next with the end result being an initial teaching licence. These alliances (partnerships) permit the sharing of the financial responsibilities for these programs through base budget allocations, grants, and gifts. Two institutions that exemplify these councils are accessible through the sites of http://www.holmespartnership.org/UNITE (Holmes Group’s Urban Network to Improve Teacher Education) and http://www.gcu-uec.org/, which is the official site for the Great Cities’ Universities Urban Educator Corps.

The Role of the P-16 Council: The authors point out that the community, by permitting the “multiple entry points into teaching” concept; they also obligate themselves to support it. Each council, typically, consists of representatives from 2-year technical colleges, school districts, teachers’ unions, school boards, local teacher education institutions, the business community, and local foundations. Collectively, they are committed to improving the quality and diversity of the local teaching force. The intent is to create a supportive community environment for implementing the full array of multiple pathways, and to make all transitions (from one point to the next) as smooth as possible. The authors acknowledge that many of the council members are still new at making smooth transitions, but everyone is learning and appreciating the fact that these so solicited and trained teachers are actually doing an excellent job and, what is even more important, they are staying. This aspect alone, they believe, makes the program worth supporting and copying.

Support for Multiple Entry Points: Considering the fact that the majority of the inner-city school districts had been hiring about a thousand new teachers per year, led by Los Angeles who had been hiring almost 5,000 new teachers last year, implementing a system that actually worked (by having new teachers actually stay), was a welcome change. With this new approach, a person wishing to teach in an urban school can “receive tailored advising to enter at the appropriate point of the career lattice and at the appropriate partner institution.” Naturally, entry points vary by discipline as well as levels of education, but in general, new urban teachers enter more successfully via routes within a “career lattice” rather than a “career ladder” approach (Bredekamp, 1992; WI Early Childhood Collaboration Partners, 2001). To facilitate the training, interactive sites have been developed. In North Carolina, students are assigned to a host site and receive instruction from master teachers and higher-education faculty (as well as 12 to 18 graduate credits). This accelerated program also provides students with mentoring and support during their first year of teaching.

Support for a Diverse Teaching Workforce: It is their opinion that diversity among teachers, hiring from the neighborhood so-to-speak, is as important as fostering diversity in the classroom. These people, selected from their own service industries, are more likely to care deeply enough to weather the ups and downs of their collective struggles to survive.

Their Conclusion: If the program is to stay in operation, meaning, to increase the number and diversity of teachers who wish to work in the urban community, the main focus must be on the design and delivery of pre-service programs. These programs must be of the highest quality no matter what the particular structure or point of entry. Their concluding remark: “This means taking standards of performance seriously, changing programs to improve, and communicating clearly to all potential students, from every pipeline and in every pathway, what it means to be a good teacher for urban schools.”

Personal Reaction.

Whenever there are either-or decisions to be made, I feel strongly about trying to preserve both points of view. If there were not a need for two points of an argument, there would be no argument. In this case, I believe the authors are right on every one of their points, but I do not believe that there could not also be a simultaneous [parallel] emphasis on striving for higher education in a manner similar to that on the UCF campus where Burnett Honors College works side-by-side with the rest of the campus. Doing so would prevent many a parent(s) from pulling their “gifted” child from their mere “neighborhood” school. Obviously, I have mixed emotions. For most of my life I held the notion that Sack’s 5^th Avenue and Klein’s should not sell each other’s shoes. Both were always presumed to go under (if they attempted it). I never had a reason to doubt this expert advice. That same may well be true with urban schools but I believe that the appropriate use of negative selling might just work. Trinity points of view work in nature at large. Personally, I look to atomic physics to provide the answers for conventional learning, in this case, it could well be that we need to ask the chemist what types of simple atoms could be introduced to the complex ones to make for better mixes, polymers, or “solutions.”