An implication for teacher education programs is to ensure that teachers are fully prepared to work with students from diverse cultural backgrounds (Burant, 1999) and are sufficiently trained and at ease working with the families of all students. I support Key's (1998) recommendations that teacher education programs "include courses that focus on teacher attitudes and arrogant perceptions" (Key, 1998, p. 91). One principle I have understood from a critical theory stance, is the necessity to first recognize the social and cultural constraints that one's background provides before they can be addressed.

Sometimes it becomes all too easy for myths to unintentionally continue to be perpetuated by a dominant class and the truths to be overlooked or not even recognized. It is vital that pre–service teachers develop the knowledge necessary to work with families from cultures different from their own. They must abandon a deficit perspective with its false assumptions about the lack of literacy forms in some families and become reflective practitioners in their own right who can independently evaluate situations on their own.

Robertson (1997) studied twelve primary school teacher education students reactions to the film Stand and Deliver in which a Hispanic teacher's disadvantaged high school students were succeeding with advanced calculus. Robertson talks about how popular culture and the media promote images of teaching with visions of devotion and self–sacrifice. She says that this teaching as a "dream of love blocks some significant tensions from consciousness" (p. 84) and "reproduces conservative values, beliefs and attitudes" (p. 85). Robertson points out the need for educators to learn how beginning teachers "come to think in different ways about teaching and how particular fantasies of teaching in white primary–school women teachers, namely the erotic notions of mastery and salvation, ignore the issues of 'race', gender, and other kinds of conflict in education" (p. 76).