Democracy and Inequality: Challenges and Possible Solutions

In April 2021 the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools^® accepted teachers from sixteen public school districts in nine states and the District of Columbia to participate in five national seminars led by Yale University faculty members. The Initiative is a long-term endeavor to influence public policy on teacher professional development, in part by establishing exemplary Teachers Institutes for high-need schools in states around the country.

Teachers Institutes are educational partnerships between universities and school districts designed to strengthen teaching and learning in a community’s high-poverty, high-minority public schools. Evaluations have shown that the Institute approach exemplifies the characteristics of high-quality teacher professional development, enhances teacher quality in the ways known to improve student achievement, and encourages participants to remain in teaching in their schools.

Thirty-nine of the teachers, named Yale National Fellows, were from school districts that are planning or exploring the establishment of a new Teachers Institute for Chicago, IL; the District of Columbia; Pittsburgh, PA; Richmond, VA; San José, CA; Tulsa, OK; and Texas. Other National Fellows come from existing Teachers Institutes located on the Navajo Nation, AZ; and in New Castle County, DE; New Haven, CT; and Philadelphia, PA. Overall, nearly half of the National Fellows were participating in national seminars for the first time.

The National Fellows attended an Organizational Session of the seminars held online on April 30-May 1. The seminars reconvened during a ten-day Intensive Session online from July 12-23 and concluded in mid-August when the Fellows submitted their completed curriculum units. The five seminars were:

• “U.S. Social Movements through Biography,” led by David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History;
• “Gender, Race, and Class in Today’s America,” led by Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Damon Wells Professor of Political Science;
• “Democracy and Inequality: Challenges and Possible Solutions,” led by Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science;
• “The Sun, the Solar System and Us,” led by Sarbani Basu, Professor of Astronomy; and
• “Human Centered Design of Biotechnology,” led by Anjelica Gonzalez, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

The purposes of the program are to provide public school teachers deeper knowledge of the subjects they teach and first-hand experience with the Teachers Institute approach to high-quality professional development. This reinforces their leadership in an existing Teachers Institute or prepares them to lead the development of a new Teachers Institute. Each teacher writes a curriculum unit to teach their students about the seminar subject and to share with other teachers in their school district and, through the website at teachers.yale.edu, with teachers anywhere. The curriculum units contain five elements: content objectives, teaching strategies, examples of classroom activities, lists of resources for teachers and students, and an appendix on the district academic standards the unit implements. In these ways the curriculum units assist teachers in engaging and educating the students in their school courses.

The curriculum units National Fellows wrote are their own; they are presented in five collections, one for each seminar. We encourage teachers who use the units to submit comments online.

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute^® is a permanently endowed academic unit of Yale University, which undertook the National Initiative in 2004.

James R. Vivian