Alternative teacher certification programs have surfaced as a popular remedy to alleviate anxieties about the quality of teachers in hard-to-staff schools and in such high needs areas as mathematics. Despite the growth in the number and influence of alternative route programs their particulars remain largely unexamined. This study addresses this situation by investigating the preparation of mathematics teachers in the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) program, an alternative route program of national prominence.

This article outlines the research questions that organize the two cases that are at the heart of this special issue, introduces the theoretical perspectives behind the project from which the cases are drawn, and describes the selection procedures for the data corpus from which the articles in the issue were developed. It also explains the interrelationships among the six pieces in the issue. In doing so, the article problematizes contemporary discourse about urban education and presents an argument for what might be learned from the practices of well-respected African American teachers of high school mathematics in large, nonselective urban schools.