Abstract
Over the past decade or more, educators and policymakers have sought to define new directions for teacher education in order to address widely perceived failures to prepare teachers adequately for the challenges to be faced in schools, especially those serving the poor and English learners. As colleges of education and urban school districts have established collaborative Professional Development Schools (PDSs) to meet the particular needs of under-resourced urban schools, they have discovered unexpected challenges that exacerbate the already difficult issues that they set out to address. This article investigates some of these structural, equity, and political obstacles that confront the reconstruction of teacher education programs in the effort to make them responsive to the needs of low-income, culturally and linguistically diverse (LI/CLD) students in public schools. In addition, the article elaborates some principles of the engaged pedagogy required to address these students' needs and the broad range of inequities that impact their schools. (Contains 1 note.)