This book profiles local and national efforts to transform urban education and reinvent urban teacher preparation. It describes real programs in real urban schools that have developed policy initiatives that promote educational equity. Community-based curricula, and teacher education and parent empowerment programs that emphaize domocratic collaboration among universities, urban teachers, parents and community memebrs. By involving all stakeholdes, this comprehesive approach provides a model for creating urban schools that not only excite and inpire, but also serve an engines for social change. Contending that urban education reform will fail without public engagement and a commitment to social justice, the contributors challenge urban educators to become accountable to their students.