Assessing a Professional Development School Approach To Preparing Teachers for Urban Schools Serving Low-Income, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities 1

Some colleges of education and urban school districts have established collaborative Professional Development Schools (PDSs) to prepare teachers across the learning-to-teach continuum (pre-service to in-service to instructional leaders) to address the particular needs of low-income, culturally and linguistically diverse (LI/CLD) students (www.holmesparternship. org/UNITE/). Outcomes, either in regard to K-12 pupils or to pre-service and in-service teachers, have been infrequently examined despite the proliferation of these reforms (Hoffman, Reed, & Rosenbluth, 1997; Johnston, Brosnan, Cramer, & Dove, 2000). Urban PDS experiments encounter many challenges that obstruct efforts to create learning environments that embody the 'engaged pedagogy' necessary for LI/CLD students to succeed (Glass & Wong, 2003). The difficulties within these K-12 classrooms and university programs are exacerbated by and connected to broader social, economic, and political problems that are endemic to these schools' communities, and that afflict their families as they struggle to survive and progress against formidable odds (Anyon, 1997). In contexts marked by these innovations and challenges, assessment becomes a key activity to understand the impact of the reform in relation to its established goals and to identify where the work is falling short so that interventions can be revised. Structured evaluation cycles and opportunities to reflect on practice and build grounded knowledge are critical to sustaining momentum for innovation. Insights gained through assessment processes, even when not positive, increase the kinds of institutional and practitioner understanding of the innovations that are necessary to deepen support. Though all PDS stakeholders affirm the importance of assessment cycles, questions immediately arise about how to evaluate the outcomes of a reform as complex as a PDS, with multiple institutional partners each impacting it at various levels. University PDS components include actions and effects at many levels: faculty member, teacher candidate, course, program, department, college, and campus. K-12 components also include actions and effects at many levels: individual teacher, pupil, grade-level, subject matter, school, union, and district. Moreover, all of these actions and effects interact with and are partially shaped by external factors, particularly the new national and statewide professional and instructional standards and associated tests. This larger policy environment highlights the difficulty of assessing the PDS approach. Further, external pressures contradict many PDS aims for more innovative instructional methods and deeper involvement of the parents and community in the school, and they drive districts and schools toward increasingly scripted teacher-centered curricula that purport to improve test scores (Jones, Jones, & Hargrove, 2003). Because the preponderance of research demonstrates that the focus on high stakes testing yields more pronounced outcome inequalities that reinforce social barriers rather than increase opportunity (Orfield & Kornhaber, 2001), and PDSs seek to overcome these precise effects, the participating university faculty and K-12 teachers are caught in a bind. Their understanding of teaching and learning leads them to search for 'authentic' forms of instruction and assessment geared into formative feedback loops designed to tailor instruction to the specific needs of their LI/CLD pupils who historically have been low-performers on standardized tests. Yet they are forced into compromises by intense pressures to raise test scores rapidly. PDS teachers across the learning-to-teach continuum know that standardized tests, however inappropriately, will be used as a significant measure of their success. Thus, the assessment of the PDS reform has to take into account that what actually is being evaluated is a bowdlerized model distorted by ideologically driven policy agendas originating outside the PDS work. …