ABSTRACT
This chapter continues to give voice to school Heads and teacher partners who engaged the offer of school university partnerships to build critical democratic work in urban schools. It is a long-term project given the neoliberal settlement with its unrelenting focus on raising achievement by way of standardized school improvement is entrenched, and the authoritarian political action is all pervading. The chapter provides a good indication of a rationale for practitioners and other stakeholders to participate in CPD so they can actively co-construct professional knowledge about urban schooling in the interests of all students. The emphases was on partnership work to develop school-generated data strategies to close the achievement gap, an ideologically driven intervention to improve performance that contrasted markedly to a local solution forged through teacher inquiry into the social determinants of disadvantaged students' learning. Before turning to practitioners' requests for even more formalized school university partnership work which calls into play a democratic agenda for urban school teaching.
