Cooperative Urban Teacher Education Program

The Cooperative Urban Teacher Education Program (CUTE) was organized in the fall of 1967 through the cooperation of several liberal arts colleges in Kansas, the Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL), and the Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas school systems. The program was based in Kansas. Iowa State University joined the program in the fall of 1969, and the coordinators at ISU for many years were in the Home Economics Education Department. CUTE offered eight weeks of multicultural training that was followed by eight, and later ten, weeks of student teaching. CUTE was designed to give future teachers a close look at different cultures and backgrounds in an urban setting. Students were immersed in city life and received an introduction to the problems of teaching in the inner-city. Iowa State pulled out of the program in 1995 citing that CUTE standards for supervision of student teaching did not match the Iowa Sate standards for student teaching supervision.