In this article, the authors describe how one group of California teacher educators has responded to the call for high school dropout rates with new thinking and action in regard to making teacher preparation a key strategy for reducing the dropout rates, raising student academic achievement, and eliminating the pervasive inequities in learning opportunities for students. The authors present a five-year initiative in which teacher preparation institutions partnered around the shared purpose of preparing new teachers to teach in secondary schools that have adopted a major reform in secondary education known as Linked Learning, a reform that research suggests is accomplishing the aforementioned results. In this reform, schools tend to operate as small learning communities in which authentic applications of curriculum center on an industry theme (e.g., health sciences, engineering, hospitality and tourism). They blend academic and career technical education and implement problem-based, interdisciplinary projects as a key instructional strategy. By design, all students experience a rigorous academic core, a demanding technical core, and associated work-based learning activities across grade levels. In addition, a range of support services is designed to help students to be successful.