History and accomplishments
Launched in 2012, the Adam Institute for Urban Teaching and School Practice builds on much of the work done through Clark’s Hiatt Center for Urban Education for almost two decades prior. The work of the institute focuses on three overlapping areas: 1) neighborhood-based University-school partnerships and effective schooling; 2) teacher education that prepares teachers to work with culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students in urban settings; and 3) educational opportunity and college-going support for neighborhood students. The neighborhood education work, in particular the success of University Park Campus School, led to the Adam bequest in 2010 by Jack Adam, a graduate in the 1930s of one of our partner schools, Worcester’s South High School. Adam acknowledged that he might not have gone to college had his mind not been awakened by a teacher who saw more in him than he did in himself at the time.
Some highlights in our journey include:
2019
Institute faculty collaborate to produce Partnership and Powerful Teacher Education: Growth and Challenge in an Urban Neighborhood (Routledge Press).
The institute launches a teacher diversity initiative in recognition of the important role that teacher diversity can play in student educational experience, attainment, and college aspiration.
2017
The Master of Arts in Teaching program is the first in Massachusetts to earn “approval with distinction.” According to the state commendation, the program “is operating at such a high level that it could serve as a model for other providers in the state and nation.”
2015
Claremont Academy earns Innovation School status.
2014
The institute hosts the Urban Teacher Education Consortium, a nationwide network of teacher educators with a shared commitment to urban teacher education and educational equity that the institute co-coordinates.
2012
The Adam Institute is formally established in the University.
Three partner schools — University Park Campus School (grades 7-12) and the Goddard and Woodland elementary schools — qualify for Innovation School status under the Massachusetts Act Relative to the Achievement Gap (2010), among the very first in Massachusetts to do so. Each has an advisory or governance board with community as well as University representation.
Claremont Academy and the University begin a new partnership commitment. The principal of University Park Campus School, who had been one of the two master’s-level teacher interns in the opening year of the school, agrees to lead Claremont in the rebuilding process.
2007
The program receives the Richard Wisniewski Award for Innovation in Teacher Education from the Society of Professors of Education.
2003
Several UPCS students take a course at the University during their senior year, the first of many to do so. Almost all of the school’s first graduates qualify for postsecondary education, an aspiration that has been fulfilled ever since.
2002
A new clinical, partnership-based and neighborhood-focused Master of Arts in Teaching program, with a full year teaching internship in a neighborhood partner school, gets underway.
1998
U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley visits University Park Campus School to highlight it as an example of innovation and a commitment to equity.
1997
University Park Campus School (UPCS), a new neighborhood-centered school established for powerful professional as well as student learning, with the promise of a tuition-free college education for qualified students admitted to the University, opens with a 7th grade class.
1995
We institute a clinically-based Master of Arts in Education program that incorporates a yearlong internship for beginning teachers, videotaped Teacher Rounds, and a culminating school-based portfolio presentation.
