In 2002, Boston’s then-superintendent Tom Payzant knew he had to find a new way to tackle the city’s growing teacher crisis. The district needed more math, science, and special education teachers, and – crucially – Boston’s highest-poverty schools needed teachers committed to teaching in challenging classrooms for more than just a few years.

Payzant also recognized that the teaching workforce was changing. Boston was seeing fewer talented young teachers wanting to make teaching a lifelong career and more wanting to teach for a few years and then move on. He needed a strategy that would secure a cadre of skilled, diverse teachers who would commit to Boston schools for at least three to six years. And, Payzant understood that the teacher preparation programs operating in Boston at the time were not going to be able to respond to these new challenges. The district would have to develop its own approach. In 2003, Payzant turned to the Boston Plan for Excellence (BPE) and worked in partnership with BPE to create the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) program.

In Chicago, a parallel story was unfolding. Mike Koldyke, a retired venture capitalist, realized that universities could not prepare enough qualified teachers for Chicago’s 408,000 students. In 2001, Koldyke was able to inspire and engage a group of business and community leaders to design a program, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), that could significantly advance and reform the teaching profession.

Understanding that producing the most effective graduates would require sound school leadership and similarly skilled colleagues, AUSL partnered with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to become a school management organization in addition to a teacher preparation program. This arrangement allows AUSL to manage low-performing CPS schools and, importantly, to staff these schools with a critical mass of AUSL teachers and hire principals and administrative teams who support the AUSL model. AUSL is now considered a crucial part of the district’s strategy to change Chicago’s lowest-performing schools.

The programs in Boston and Chicago are known as urban teacher residencies (UTRs) because they are based on the medical residency model that pairs professional course work with embedded clinical experience. UTRs are a nascent approach, but they have gained significant attention recently. The recognition is growing that the UTR design incorporates elements that research indicates are important for preparing and supporting beginning teachers – from a rigorous recruiting and admissions process to an intense three-year induction period.

Although these programs are too new to yield data on whether they are improving student learning in Boston and Chicago, promising early results indicate, among other impacts, that teachers trained in UTRs are far more likely to stay in high-needs schools. As a result, there is interest at the federal level in expanding these programs. The Higher Education Act includes millions of dollars in funding to start up or expand current UTR programs. And Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has given the idea very public support.