Low-Income Schools

Where Teachers Thrive is based on interview studies conducted in fourteen high-poverty, urban schools. It focuses on the context of teachers’ work, examining why some schools failed to make progress, while others achieved remarkable results. It explores...

Background/Context

Many strategies to improve failing urban schools rest on efforts to improve leadership within the school. Effective school-based leadership depends not only on the activities of the principal, but also on teachers’ efforts to address...

Background/Context: Over the past three decades, teacher turnover has increased sub- stantially in U.S. public schools, especially in those serving large portions of low-income students of color. Teachers who choose to leave high-poverty schools serving...

Abstract

Purpose: We examine how uncertainty, both about students and the context in which they are taught, remains a persistent condition of teachers’ work in high-poverty, urban schools. We describe six schools’ organizational responses to these...

Teacher teams are increasingly common in urban schools. In this study, we an- alyze teachers’ responses to teams in six high-poverty schools. Teachers used two criteria to assess teams’ goodness of fit in meeting the demands of their work: whether their...

Background/Context: Many urban schools today look to instructional teams as a means to decrease professional isolation, promote teachers’ ongoing development, and substantially reduce well-documented variation in teachers’ effectiveness across classrooms...

We studied how six high-performing, high-poverty schools in one large Massachusetts city imple- mented the state’s new teacher evaluation policy. The sample includes traditional, turnaround, restart, and charter schools, each of which had received the...

Background/Context: Educational policy makers have begun to recognize the challenges posed by teacher turnover. Schools and students pay a price when new teachers leave the pro- fession after only 2 or 3 years, just when they have acquired valuable...

This qualitative analysis of teacher teams is part of a larger, comparative case study, “Developing Human Capital Within Schools,” conducted by the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers.  Within one city, we interviewed 142 teachers and...

This qualitative analysis of peer observation practices is part of a larger, comparative case study, “Developing Human Capital Within Schools,” conducted by the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. Within one city, we interviewed 142 teachers and...