ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates some of the core challenges that are currently being encountered by urban schools and concurrently researchers, theorists, practitioners and policy makers in urban education. The literature regarding teacher preparation/education and urban education is not well developed. In short, teachers are not being well prepared to teach in urban schools across the United States, which is directly connected to their performance in these schools. Typically educational researchers and practitioners when using the term urban offer it as a euphemism for Black, Brown, and poor students. The realities of large, growing cities and districts is that there is a need to rethink the manner in which teachers are equipped to work with students who possess a wide array of academic, linguistic, psychological, social, and emotional needs. An increasing amount of research has been dedicated to examining the influence subject matter knowledge has on teacher effectiveness and student learning, and the findings from these studies have been mixed.
