This article examines minority teacher recruitment policies and programs of the past two decades and explores their influence on the racial/ethnic makeup of the teaching force in elementary and secondary public schools. The results show that while important progress has been made toward increasing the overall number and proportion of minority teachers in the public schools, those gains have been eclipsed by the rapid growth of the minority student population. As a result, the racial/ethnic gap between students of color and their teachers has actually increased over the years. The authors provide an overview of current minority teacher recruitment state policies and introduce the Teacher-Student Parity Index, a new metric for comparing the proportions of teachers and students from different racial/ethnic groups to gain a more textured understanding of the demographic reality of today's schools than is presently found in the literature. The authors conclude with recommendations for policy and research.

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Utilizing a complex theory of teacher learning and practice, this chapter analyzes ~120 empirical studies of content teacher development (both preservice and in-service) for working with multilingual learners as well as research on content teaching for multilingual students. Our analysis identified three dimensions of quality content teaching for multilingual learners that are complex and intricately connected: context, orientations, and pedagogy. This chapter explores the results of our literature analysis and argues for improving content teaching for multilingual students through improved theoretically grounded research that embraces, explores, and accounts for the expansive complexities inherent in teacher learning and practice.

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Recent accountability policies seek to "grade" teacher preparation programs by the teaching evaluations of their graduates. This article addresses the problematic nature of the linear thinking underlying such reforms by examining the construction of teaching practices of Mauro, a first-year secondary science teacher who taught environmental and earth sciences. Drawn from a larger data set, the study uses concepts from rhizomatics, a non-linear theory of thought and social activity, and elements of postmodern grounded theory. Despite holding key factors constant across the two subject area settings, differences in the ways the teacher, students, and contextual conditions worked together helped produce strikingly different teaching practices in each set of classes. This study provides evidence that enacting pre-professional learning is a complex undertaking shaped by the ways the elements present in the school setting work together, and, thus, teaching is a collectively negotiated activity. The author offers implications for teacher preparation practice and policy, advocating for an ontological turn in teacher education research that focuses on processes of teaching rather than outcomes alone.

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