Seeing the Pedagogies, Practices, and Programs Urban Students Want

Discussions of school and teacher quality now occur regularly in the United States: The ways in which teachers are licensed and assessed are frequently subjects of heated debates. Most concepts of teacher and school effectiveness focus narrowly on educators' subject area proficiency and students' performance on high-stakes assessments. Missing in most of these discussions are the voices of diverse city youth, who might suggest teacher traits and school and teacher practices and curricula that would be particularly effective for urban high school students. Adolescents' points of view are especially important to consider in light of city community members' multigenerational disengagement from school, which is evident in decades of elevated high school dropout rates. The research on which this article reports used visually based methods with which city students are already proficient in order to access their perceptions of teacher and school quality.