Supporting urban teachers through school-community partnerships

Running head: SUPPORTING URBAN TEACHERS 1
Supporting Urban Teachers: Improving the Learning Experiences of Urban Students through
School-Community Partnerships
Katrina D. McClenon
University of Illinois at Chicago
Fall 2011

2
SUPPORTING URBAN TEACHERS
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of urban teachers, specifically, to
understand the unique characteristics of their student populations and how the students’ social
and cultural experiences affect the teachers’ ability to be effective educators. The diversity of
urban students implies that culture and family dynamics create new and challenging obstacles,
preventing their full engagement of school curriculum and activities. This paper also explores
ways that teacher preparation at universities and Urban Teacher Academies (UTA’s) are
preparing urban teachers to engage the entire community and more effectively utilize resources
that will allow them to provide a more effective learning experience for their students. There are
a variety of ways parents, organizations and community leaders can engage urban schools and
expand the capacity of urban schools to meet the needs of their students.

3
Supporting Urban Teachers: Improving the Learning Experiences of Urban Students through
Urban teaches are ordinary people called to do an extra-ordinary service. They are
professionals, like doctors, trusted by society to do a job, unlike any other. They are held
responsible for taking the lead toward shaping the intellectual development of the world’s youth.
Unfortunately the needs of teachers are rarely given in-depth consideration in reform measures
designed to improve the overall quality of urban schools. School reform is typically created by
policy-makers and civic leaders who control all the resources in a position far from the
classroom, leaving the onus of implementation more heavily on teachers and the administrations
who lead them.
Findings by Brunetti (2006), suggested that successful urban teachers, with a least 15
years experience, thoroughly enjoyed their work and the positive impact they had on students,
largely because they felt supported by their colleagues and administrators (Brunetti, 2006). They
enjoyed the impact they had on their students and felt supported by their colleagues and
administrators. In a separate study, highly performing teachers, as identified by their respective
administrators, shared cultural characteristics with their students (McKinney, Berry, Dickerson
& Campbell-Whatley, 2007). Such teachers ' familiarity with the environment and broader social
and cultural experiences of the students they teach made them want to do their job.
Relative to the demands placed on them, urban schools are not likely to have the adequate
support services for students or professional development opportunities for teachers (Manz,
Power, Ginsburg-Block & Dowrick, 2010). It is impossible for an urban teacher to look past the
social and cultural realities of their students or to ignore the communities in which those schools
are located. Increasingly, the demand of the urban environment, teacher education programs,

4
reform initiatives are focusing on the need for increased collaboration between urban schools and
their surrounding communities. In order to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population
of students, urban teachers need specialized skills and strong support from parents, community
members and policy makers.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of urban teachers, specifically,
understanding the unique characteristics of their student populations and how their social and
culture experiences affect the teachers ability to be effective educators. The diversity of urban
students implies that culture and family dynamics create new and challenging obstacles,
preventing their full engagement of school curriculum and activities. This paper also explores
ways that teacher preparation at universities and Urban Teacher Academies (UTA’s) are
preparing urban teachers to engage the entire community and more effectively utilize resources
that will allow them to provide a more effective learning experience for their students. There are
a variety of ways parents, organizations and community leaders can engage urban schools and
expand the capacity of urban schools to meet the needs of their students.
The Urban Teaching Experience
While stress is the sum of natural physiological and psychological reactions to the
environment, when teachers are stressed, it can have detrimental effects on their physical health,
individual student experiences and the learning environment in general. Teacher stress tends to
be the result of chronic feelings of emotional exhaustion, fatigue and negative attitudes toward
their students (Wiley, 2002). In response to the social realities of their students, the role of urban
teachers has evolved as they perceive the need to serve as a social-worker, nurturer, appeaser,
counselor, and teacher to their students (Erskine-Cullen & Sinclair, 1996).

5
Understanding the unique challenges of urban teachers require an understanding of the
students they are responsible for teaching. Urban schools are more likely to serve students living
in poverty and very likely to be members of ethnic/racial minority groups, primarily African
American, Hispanic and Asian American (NCES, 2010). In the past 20 years, the racial/ethnic
composition of American youth has reflected a decline in the white population and steady
increases in Hispanic and Asian populations (NCES, 2010). With such drastic changes in the
student population, urban teachers are required toextend more effort toward program
modification in order to address the wide variety of intellectual and academic needs of their
students (Erskine-Cullen & Sinclair, 1996).
At the start of the twenty-first century, the Hispanic population in the entire country
surpassed that of black Americans for the first time (NCES, 2010). This suggests an increased
need in urban schools for ELL programming. The parents of Hispanic youth are the least likely
of parents from all other racial/ethnic groups to have at least a bachelor’s degree (NCES, 2010).
As a result, these parents may be less likely to transmit information and provide support that
would contribute to the academic success of their children. The rapid growth of any population
would require schools to respond to the growing needs of the families, identity and culture of
such students.
When compared to students who attend rural or suburban schools, urban students
demonstrated lower academic performance and demonstrated more behavior problems overall.
Stability is also a major issue for urban students, who are highly likely to change schools in the
middle of the academic year; this higher rate of mobility for students leads to lack of engagement
with school activities and programs (Erskine-Cullen & Sinclair, 1996). These trends have been

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linked to lower rates of high school completion and participation in full-time employment and
higher rates of poverty and unemployment later on in life. (NCES, 1996).
Family structure is another factor influencing the experiences of urban youth and their
teachers. In general, urban youth are less likely than students in rural and suburban environments
to have a traditional family structure that provides the economic security and stability required
for them to realize positive academic outcomes (NCES, 1996). This is particularly relevant for
African American students, who have higher educational aspirations when they perceive their
parents/guardians to have high expectations of them (NCTAF, 2009). While the expectations of
parents/guardians of minority youth might be high, the quality of support they are able to provide
may not be as great, since Hispanic and black youth and least likely to have parents with some
form of postsecondary education and an overwhelming majority (56%) of black youth live in a
household with only a single female parent (NCES, 2010).
While increased accountability measures may emphasize the need to improve student
performance on standardized tests, teachers perceive the emotional needs of their students to be
their greatest challenge (Erskine-Cullen & Sinclair, 1996). Although urban teachers typically
have fewer resources and less control over the curriculum used in their classrooms (NCES,
1996), when their schools perform poorly, they are accused of being inexperience and
unprepared (NCTAF, 2009). Stress related to addressing the unique needs of urban students
affects the performance of the entire school.
In the book, So Much Reform, So Little Change, Payne (2008), describes the dysfunction
of urban schools that prevents learning and academic gains from taking place; especially where
the teachers are overwhelmed by the stressors created by their environment, administrators lack
the skills necessary to be effective leaders to such teachers and the collection of negative

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attitudes toward their shared task, make reform efforts ineffective. Given the social realities of
their students, teachers in urban schools are often resistant to new initiatives to improve student
performance due to skepticism, because their focus is either on the history of failure they are
most familiar or negative assumptions about what their students outcomes will be (Payne, 2008).
This is disheartening, especially since urban students identify a supportive school social climate
and positive relationships with teachers as being strong influences to their academic success
(Shumer, 1994; Esposito, 1999) and conversely, resist programs that emphasize controlling
behavior or sustain negative opinions of them (Biggs & Colesante, 2000).
Increasingly, the issues facing urban teachers are becoming a cause for public concern. In
an opinion piece published by the Chicago Tribune newspaper, a teacher expresses his concern
over the lack of respect shown by the Chicago Board of Education for the teachers it hires to
teach CPS students (Libman, 2011). Among the issues raised in the story were the inefficient use
of instructional time for serving meals to students, the proposed longer school day despite the
elimination of the 4 percent salary increase teachers expected and the growing trend of less
compensation for increased accountability measures which target teachers directly (Libman,
2011).
Mr. Libman's sentiments were echoed just one day later, when a Tribune reporter wrote
about the concerns expressed by teachers over the proposed use of student academic growth as a
key component of teacher ratings (Ahmend-Ullah, 2011). While this seems reasonable enough,
that public school teachers would be evaluated on their ability to bring about academic progress,
their day to day experiences require them to do so much more than teach. In Chicago, a city that
has seen 3 distinct eras of reform in the past 20 years (Luppescu, et.al, 2011), the Chicago Public
Schools system is a national example for radical reform that places teachers at ground zero for

8
interpreting, implemented and sustaining change, without any real promise of improving
conditions through the availability of support for teachers and as a result, students are
increasingly less likely to express they have positive and supportive relationships with their
classroom teachers (Luppescu et al., 2011)..
Teacher Centered Approaches for School Improvement
Many of the concerns expressed in the newspaper articles mentioned in the previous
section are being addressed by the efforts of the National Commission on Teaching and
America’s Future (NCTAF), a major player in promoting the idea that student learning requires
quality teaching in schools that are organized and functioning in a manner that promotes
academic success (NCTAF, 2006). Through research, reporting their finding and working with
strategic partners, the NCTAF works to implement policies and programs that make quality
teaching accessible to all students. In a report published in 2007, the NCTAF suggested that only
through meaningful collaborations with teachers, can public school districts effectively address
poor distributions of human capital in the form of teachers with experience and strong skills and
high rates of teacher turnover at the schools with the greatest need (NCTAF, 2007).
Teacher education programs across the country and more modern invention of urban
teacher academies are constantly developing programs to address the specialized training and
skill needs required for teacher in urban schools to be more effectives. A key task for such
programs is to help teachers understand the context of urban schools and learn to utilize all
available resources (Warren, Noftle, Ganley &Quintanar, 2011). Urban teacher academies or
UTA’s provide teachers with realistic, in-depth training working in urban classrooms and
engaging urban school districts that allow them the ingenuity to remain in the field for many
years (NCTAF, 2009).The opportunity to learn inside of urban schools, provides teacher-

9
candidates with opportunities to practice and learn the value of positive relationships the other
key member of the learning community.
Urban teacher academies or UTA’s are truly unique in the regard, that the great majority
of the degree programs take place in school where teacher candidates are likely to teacher and
take on a variety of roles to improve the learning environment (NCTAF, 2009). While UTA’s
emphasize the value of on-site experiences in teacher preparation, specialized coursework can be
influential as well. Warren et al. (2011) found that a single course on family and community
involvement helped teachers to develop a more positive understanding of the value of their own
role as members of their student’s communities. By the end of the term, the teachers had learned
about viable resources within the community and developed a greater desire to become active
members of that community (Warren et al., 2011).
When teachers are well-prepared and have a deep understanding of the unique demands
of their teaching environments, they have the potential to have a greater impact on students in
their classes, even without working directly with any other members of the community. In a
study of 7 active teachers with a history of collaborating with one another to make social justice
a component of their student’s learning experiences, they were able to address their students
concerns about violence and other community problems by incorporating those experiences into
the curriculum through righting and team building activities (Duncan-Andrade, 2004). Most
initiatives to improve the outcomes of urban youth are more effective when they can become a
part of the existing curriculum (Charlier, Glover & Robertson, 2009). The success of these
teacher, their retention, and ongoing professional development was attributed to the critical
teacher inquiry group they formed (Duncan-Andrade, 2004).

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Epstein’s model for providing a comprehensive educative experience for youth (as cited in
(Sanders, 2009)) represents home, school and community as three separate spheres which have
positive impacts on students when they are pulled closely together. Community involvement in
urban education can be understood as shared efforts of stakeholders to contribute to the shaping
and implementation of reform efforts (Charlier et al., 2009). Community partnership models in
urban schools expand the school’s professional capacity through relationship formed by
stakeholders who share a vision for the academic growth of urban youth (Manz et al., 2010). It is
a requirement of such models that all the stakeholders (students, families, teachers, and
community organizations and businesses, share a strong interest in reform initiatives to improve
the educational outcomes of the students (Charlier et al., 2009).
It has been suggested that inner city youth who survive urban conditions that place them
in the “at-risk” category, had some relationship with organizations in their neighborhoods that
encouraged active participation (Biggs & Colesante, 2000). Partnerships between urban schools
and community resources can take on many forms. Among the potential community partners for
urban schools are religious and health organizations, non-profit foundations, other schools, and
community members who are willing to volunteer in schools or as members of school-based
councils (Sanders & Harvey, 2002).
In a case study by Sanders and Harvey (2002), successful partnerships between schools
and communities were primarily attributed to aspects of the schools condition to receive
community support; they included principal’s leadership for welcome community support overall
commitment to learning, openness to community involvement, efforts to engage in
communication with potential partners (Sanders & Harvey, 2002). Even though their leadership

11
toward such initiatives is very important to ensure success, principals often too overwhelmed
with the day-to-day challenges of managing the local level of responsibility and are often unable
to examine each of the alternatives and order to make a sound decision (Payne, 2008). This is
especially so in schools where there are a high proportion of students from lower SES, principals
tend to believe there are more important priorities to engage in (Charlier et al., 2009).
One way that community partnerships benefit students directly is by providing
opportunities outside of school that supplement the development of their character and make
learning material more relevant to their future plans. Aimed at preventing at-risk students from
dropping-out, a Community-Based Learning Program (CBL) provided students opportunities to
perform community service and learn about how their classroom experiences might contribute to
their success later in life (Shumer, 1994). As a result of their participation in the program, the
urban high school students were more motivated to attend school, especially if that meant they
could participate in the CBL, therefore, they had better attendance and higher levels of
engagement with their schools (Shumer, 1994).
Another way to bridge the gap between urban schools and the surrounding community is
to enlist the help of community members who are willing to volunteer or serve as non-certified
staff in the schools. If they are properly prepared and their help is acceptable by schools,
paraeducators can help make the overall educative experiences of urban youth more culturally
relevant, while extending the school’s instructional capacity (Manz et al., 2010). As uncertified
staff members, community paraeducators can work to foster school-home relationships by
providing added insight to teachers and most importantly a service that teachers are sometimes
too overwhelmed to fulfill- addressing the broader contextual needs of students (Manz et al.,
2010). As with any successful school-community partnership, the effective use of community

12
paraeducators requires that they are trained and have good relations with teachers and
administrators.
One issue associated with the use of community paraeducators is that as members of
urban communities, they are also highly likely to be members of ethnic minority groups and
suffer from many of the same challenges as urban students- socioeconomic disadvantages and
low educational attainment- which might make it difficult for teaching professionals to accept
their assistance. Before community educators can make any impact, schools must establish clear
expectations, provide training and support, support relationships between educators and
paraeducators and finally, demonstrate a commitment to sound-decision-making and
accountability measures (Manz et al., 2010).
There are two very important ways for parents to support school-community partnerships,
taking advantage of community resources that make them more supportive of teachers and their
children’s learning and also through active participation in school based-councils and advisory
committees. Community schools and resources centers provide a wide range of programs to
provide comprehensive for urban families (O’Donnell et al., 1999). In a study that included a
vast majority of Latino students, parents indicated that they participated in order to help their
students through learning how to communicate more effectively with them, help them with their
school assignments and improve their grades (O’Donnell et al., 1999). While this reflects
evidence that supporting urban families is the key to supporting urban students, schools were
essential to efforts to inform families of the available resources. Most parents who took
advantage of services offered at the community school had learned about them from
presentations, events and meetings at their child’s regular school (O’Donnell et al., 1999).

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Parents can also help address needs that teachers are simply unable to on their own, by
organizing and forming their own partnerships with district leaders. Sanders (2009) describes a
Community Based Parent Involvement Organization (CPIO), which began as a loose network of
parent leaders and evolved into a formally recognized organization and partner to district leaders
and to their neighborhood school. Through this partnership, parents gained relational power,
manifested as respect from their school district and came to be recognized as an equal partner in
efforts to address key issues (Sanders, 2009). Such efforts of parents are crucial, as they reflect
growing acceptance of the social, cultural, economic and political characteristics of their
communities and greater likeliness that these factors will receive greater consideration in the
development implementation of reform initiatives.
Lessons and Conclusion
This review of literature relied heavily on studies that utilized qualitative research
methods (interviews, case-studies, etc.) or that focused on the experiences of teachers, students
and partnerships in specific school environments. These issues make it more difficult to utilize
the findings in making assumptions about all urban teachers and the impact and implication of
community involvement on urban students. However, the information presented provides a
snapshot of urban schools and the challenges teachers, students and administrators endure. It also
shed light on ways that teacher preparation and various community players are all stakeholders,
interested in the outcomes of urban students.
The first step toward improving the educative experiences of urban students is to develop
a full understanding of their unique needs and how these needs impact the ability of their
teachers to be successful. The diversity of students in urban environments means that urban
teachers must mediate the challenges associate with such diversity while striving to meet

14
expectations established by policy-makers and district leaders who rule from a broader cultural
perspective. In order to be effective working with urban youth, it has been suggested that
providing opportunities for youth to solve problems, make decisions, and collaborate with others
with their peers are most effective (Biggs & Colesante, 2000). Community agencies and non-
profit organizations can provide resources making these experiences available to them.
When teachers are aware of available community resources and have the support of their
principals in incorporating them as part of the school environment, the burden of educating urban
students can be lifted. Increasingly, teacher education programs are emphasizing the need of
urban teachers to recognize and utilize the resources available throughout the community.
Productive partnerships reflect a level of trust between all parties, including administrators,
teachers, district officials and community leadership (Charlier et al., 2009). Trust is very
important and often difficult to establish, especially when issues of privilege and power
complicate the implementation and success of efforts undertaken by actors having diverse racial,
ethnic and social characteristics (Cousins, Mickelson, Williams & Velasco, 2008). By working
together, participants of school-based partnerships can identify and more importantly, address
the myriad of challenges urban youth must overcome in order to be successful.
If it takes a village to raise a child, school plays a critical role in keeping the entire village
together. School is a common denominator for all urban children and their families. Other
community members stand to benefit from well educated and active youth with the strong
support of their families. The urban teaching experience can be extremely challenging and
overwhelming. However, there are support services available in order to address many of the
social problems that hinder the intellectual development of America’s urban youth. When they

15
all work together, the web support is more solid; free-flowing communication and collaboration
in decision-making are essential.

16
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