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Going to Scale with Smart Systems: VUE Number 28, Summer 2010
A broad, cross-sector web of partnerships between a school district and outside partners, aligned and informed by excellent data systems, is an essential ingredient for building sustainable reform at scale.
If educators alone are responsible for ensuring that our children and youth develop into knowledgeable, caring, and productive adults, we will not succeed. To reach this goal, partnerships that involve city and state
agencies, government, nonprofits, for-profits, and citizen’s groups are essential.
Schools-only approaches to improving outcomes for children have not closed long-standing achievement gaps (A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education 2008). Improving instruction during the school day and within classrooms is critically necessary for reforming schools and districts; however, systemic inequities will only be addressed by providing a range of additional services through coordination with external agencies and partners. Ultimately, the goal of such a web of cross-sector partnerships is “a comprehensive, seamless approach to learning that values the distinct experiences that families, schools, afterschool programs, and communities provide for children” (Time, Learning, and Afterschool Task Force 2007, foreword).
Partnerships are not new to education. But more and more, external partners are playing a central role in areas that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of school districts. Collaborative partnerships are able to tap unused or underutilized capacity within school systems and in communities to improve outcomes for students. External partners can play multiple roles inside and outside the system, depending on expertise and need. In examining a critical area of what the Annenberg Institute for School Reform calls smart education systems – a broad, cross-sector web of learning and youth development opportunities and supports – we see how external partnerships can help expand the capacity of both school systems and communities to improve student outcomes. Cross-sector partnerships include the voices of a wide range of leaders and advocates who share authority and accountability for the planning, decision making, implementation, and critique of their work so that no opportunity is missed to give all children in the community an excellent education.
High-quality, cross-sector partnerships, let alone a web of partnerships across an entire school district or city, are still rare. However, drawing on research into high-quality partnerships, the Mott Foundation’s New Day for Learning initiative has outlined the key components of such high-quality, cross-sector partnerships (Time, Learning, and Afterschool Task Force 2007).
In this article, we examine how building capacity through partnerships is playing out in one traditional urban district – Chicago – and in one more decentralized and evolving system, New Orleans. Using a case study approach, we conducted interviews with over fifty people in Chicago and New Orleans to better understand how they are developing cross-sector partnerships to support education. We conclude with a set of implications for building and sustaining high-quality partnerships that include partners external to the school district under such different sets of circumstances.
New Orleans: Partnerships to Support Rebuilding an Education System – and a City
Cross-sector partnerships require communication and trust – and they take time. All of these are ingredients that most individuals and groups in New Orleans admit are in short supply. As the vision for education in New Orleans evolves and the demand increases for high-quality, equitable learning environments for all children, the contributions made by cross-sector partners will become more necessity than luxury and may well be the new “life support” for public education in New Orleans.
Parents and families we interviewed regularly experience the fragmentation of services resulting, in part, from the limited amount of resources available to reach residents across the city. Post-Katrina schools are attempting to compensate for the distance between home and school by placing some services on-site that might normally be found in neighborhoods.
The Orleans Parish Education Network (OPEN) and Educate Now are two examples of partnerships that have emerged post-Katrina with different entry points, strategies, and approaches to creating partnerships across sectors in New Orleans. OPEN was established for the purpose of creating a community-driven process for education reform. This partnership was intentionally designed to be a provisional structure and is using a participatory process to engage people across the ideological divides in the city to support a set of common education goals related to the current reform. Educate Now seeks to ensure that the education reforms that have already begun in New Orleans are sustainable and effective. A goal of the organization is to provide the public with current, comprehensive information about the evolving system of decentralized schools in New Orleans, which includes public charter schools and schools operated by the Recovery School District (RSD) and the Orleans Parish School Board (OPS).1
When examples of collaboration with city departments in Orleans Parish were mentioned by the stakeholder groups we interviewed, they described partnerships that were temporary and ad hoc in nature. There were no formal or informal partnerships identified with the mayor’s office since the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) Committee was convened immediately following the storm. A cross-sector planning committee that included housing, transportation, health, parks and recreation, and other municipal departments collaborated with OPSB and RSD to craft the Master Plan for School Facilities; this process was often cited by participants as the most visible example of a cross-sector partnership.
In Orleans Parish, the education subcommittee of the City Council is the only group within municipal government that was frequently mentioned as an ongoing partner in education. The subcommittee oversees the funding the city provides to OPSB. Public education funding in Orleans Parish is drawn from a portion of the sales tax but not from property taxes. State and federal dollars are the primary funding source for public education in New Orleans and, as a result, the mayor and City Council have limited fiscal control. As a group, the education subcommittee acts as a watchdog and raises questions on behalf of the community. But they have also had their own 
internal battles about the priority that should be given to education in the devastated versus non-devastated areas of the city. Thus, the subcommittee’s power and influence seemed
tied more to constituency than to a shared platform and agenda to support systemic change.
Partnerships with other city agencies were viewed as crucial by all stakeholder groups that we interviewed, as these institutions provide the parks, playgrounds, pools, libraries, arts institutions, and community centers that children and families sorely need, especially in the most devastated areas of the city. Young people we interviewed also expressed their frustration that there weren’t enough constructive activities for them outside of school and in their communities to meet their diverse interests and needs.
The full range of services and activities that were available for youth pre-Katrina were severely diminished when many nonprofits were unable to reopen and service providers did not return after the storm. When we interviewed education leaders and community stakeholders, it was noted by several of them that as many as 50 percent of the nonprofits that existed pre-Katrina did not reopen after the storm. The dramatic reduction in external service providers is a critical loss for public schools that depend on nonprofits and community-based organizations to provide essential programs and social services for young people during school, after school, and in the summer months.
The need for such services – especially in the area of mental health – has become even more acute as the post-traumatic stress of Katrina continues to impact the lives of children and families years later. Many young people experienced firsthand the death of family members and the loss of their homes, neighborhoods, and possessions. And regardless of where they lived in the city, all children experienced some degree of disruption in their daily routine.
In a study conducted by Louisiana State University of post-traumatic stress disorder in New Orleans since Katrina, 38 percent of the 1,181 participants were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or showed symptoms, which is ten times higher than the national average and a clear sign that people are still in distress (DeWulf et al., 2007). Many individuals and groups we interviewed responded with their concern about the mental health issues that young people are dealing with as a result of what they saw and experienced. Teachers were the most keenly aware of their students’ mental health needs, which they say remain unmet; they were frustrated by the limited resources available for educators to respond.
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Partnerships with Local Agencies to Provide Wraparound Services | |
| BROTHER MICHAEL REIS CEO, Tides Family Services Partnerships between school systems and local agencies that provide community-based wraparound programming are an essential element to bring together local schools and estranged families. The key factors in making “inside/outside” partnerships work are a clear mission, committed staff, and outcome-driven data. It only works if you do what you say you’ll do and allow outcome data to drive the program. Obviously, your staff will have to be very willing to accept change and open to trying new models. They are the heart and soul of creating positive change. This only occurs if they truly believe in the mission. Their commitment is to each and every youngster and |
family. “No Reject No Eject.” If we care enough, we’ll figure something out. The dominant force is strength-based family therapy. The assessment begins with a simple question, “What’s working for you?” This is a radical change in approaching these families, empowering parents. Helping is built upon respect and caring. A second major issue is the inclusion of “wraparound support” from within the community to help support the families. Many of the poorer families suffer from several basic needs that are not being met. The new best practice models work hard on developing networks to support in the community who can be available to meet the various levels of Maslow’s needs. In Rhode Island, the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) implemented a program for at-risk |
families called Family Care
Community Partners (FCCP). They combined all of their prevention monies and now have four FCCPs to cover the State. The FCCPs are based on the High Fidelity Wraparound model. The four lead agencies were responsible to organize within each of the four regions a network of support services ranging from kinship to school systems. Each family that becomes involved is assigned a worker who helps the family to access needed services.
After the first year of operation, the results are encouraging. Systems that provide positive working partnerships that allow parents to be effectively involved and have a real voice will have a much better chance of educating at-risk youth. |
Leadership from both school districts in New Orleans – OPSB and RSD – noted that the infrastructure of external supports that previously existed is now “small and limited” in scope and agreed that agencies have been “slow to rebound” from the storm. School-based leaders have had to work independently to cultivate their own cross-sector supports and opportunities for students. Some schools and school networks are now able to offer services such as on-site health centers, psychological counseling, social workers, cultural and arts activities, family outreach programs, and Saturday schools. But there were clearly disparities across schools and neighborhoods in the external supports that were available to students. Added to the challenge of a diminished nonprofit infrastructure is the limited role that faith-based organizations can now play in support of young people outside of school. They, too, are still struggling to rebuild and have been unable to fill in the gap by providing the same range of services that have traditionally been offered to the community.
Communication channels were also seen as a barrier to cross-sector collaboration among the stakeholders we interviewed. School Connect, operated by HandsOn New Orleans, is one central repository or database of information where many of the existing resources have been collected or “mapped” across the city; schools are given an opportunity to identify their needs and find a match. This information seems essential not only for schools and districts that are trying to locate available resources, but also for some of the small or fledgling nonprofits that might be looking to ramp up or extend their capacity by collaborating with other nonprofits that have a similar program or mission.
Building partnerships within the education sector that can collaborate around a shared vision for change is important. However, reaching out beyond education to establish partnerships across sectors can only enhance the chances that planning for the core systems that many students and families rely on will happen concurrently, rather than serially, and in ways that can improve a child’s overall quality of life.
Chicago: A Cross-Sector Partnership to Support Out-of-School-Time Opportunities and Supports
Both the Chicago Public Schools’ Community Schools Initiative (CSI) and the citywide Out-of-School Time Project represent vigorous (and intertwined) efforts to harness the energy and resources of these sectors to serve students and families. CSI, overseen by Chicago Public Schools (CPS), links nonprofit organizations in the arts, youth development, community, and social service sectors with public schools in CPS. The Out-of-School Time Project coordinates citywide agencies and nonprofit organizations (including the leadership of CSI) around afterschool programming for youth. These are joint initiatives with the school district’s Office of Extended Learning Opportunities. A clear picture of the multi-layered system that provides out-of-school opportunities for youth in Chicago is critical to understanding the overarching citywide cross-sector partnerships.
The initial impetus for the Chicago Out-of-School Time Project was a five-year grant from the Wallace Foun-dation, but it operates with substantial investment from its lead partner organizations – CPS, the Chicago Public Libraries, the Chicago Parks District, Chicago’s Department of Children and Youth Services, and After-School Matters. The chief executives of the five lead organizations also serve on the board, along with CEOs and leaders of other key agencies, including the Chicago Housing Authority, the Police Department, the Polk Bros. Foundation, and Metropolis 2020, which represents civic and commercial interests in the city. As the initial Wallace Foundation funding comes to an end, there is movement to formalize the partnership to ensure sustainability.
Leadership for Five Major Areas of Partnership Work
Just below the board level is the Leadership Group, with appointed members from the five lead organizations, which serves as the operational heart of the Out-of-School Time Project. One of our interviewees described the Leadership Group as a
strong, cohesive group, passionate about what they do. … We all have the ear of our commissioners and a strong belief that we can do this. … That’s important to have – a group with “like-mind.” No grandstanding.
Another Leadership Group member talked about the group’s decision-making ability:
[The Leadership Group is] a relatively high-level group. Not the chief executive level, but one step below. We have decision-making authority and are familiar with the resources in our own organizations. When we sit down to coordinate, we really get things done. It’s really helpful to have those relationships right under the chief executive level. A lot of things happened that wouldn’t have happened without this group – our executives [only] meet every six months.
This group focuses on the five major areas of work of the partnership, described by a member of the Leadership Group:
The Key Role of Data and Indicators
Another Leadership Group member described the Out-of-School Time Project’s recent, significant focus on collecting and sharing data across the lead agencies:
We began work on all five [major] areas [of work], but we prioritized the most fundamental and high value to each organization – that was data. The primary motive for focusing on data was program participant tracking. [We began] building standardization into the data [by] implicitly coordinating and building commonality. We left the option to join the [data] system up to each partner. After School Matters already had their own data system, but they eventually came to our system. Others came to our system [as well]. … That area of work has continued to be the most concrete. We have a data system called Cityspan. The fact that partners had confidence in pulling together what was needed to support them furthered substantive partnership.
The data system – Cityspan – is designed to “sit on top of” the legacy data systems of the five lead organizations, but with the ability to pull data from any one of those systems and create simple and usable reports. The goal for the next year is to create a “data dashboard” across all five data systems.
However, in developing this data system, there were serious privacy concerns raised by the Chicago Public Libraries, and they were very reluctant to participate. After lengthy discussions within the Leadership Group, however, the Libraries created what one respondent called an “externally focused” program, which involved an “opt-in” system of data gathering that allowed all organizations to move forward with data collection while still respecting privacy concerns.
This focus on data is a major reason why Chicago Public Schools was attracted to the partnership initially. According to one CPS respondent,
The initial common reason to be at the table [was having] at least one thing in common – the need to collect data. [It is] a strategic way to inform our work. That galvanized this partnership, each of us figuring out how to interact and do that. We’re at a collective place where we have the data.
She credited the Out-of-School Time Project as “opening up [the Community Schools Initiative] to using data management.” The Office of Extended Learning Opportunities (OELO) is considering going beyond CSI and OELO and pulling in other CPS departments to begin using the Cityspan data system, including the office that handles sports for the district.
Along with the development of this Cityspan data system, the leadership group realized early in the work of the project that indicators of quality would not be effective if imposed at the outset, rather than built from the ground up. One leadership group member noted,
I believe strongly that if we went out of the gates saying that we’d decided these are eighteen indicators of program quality, that would have been a divisive tactic. It would have emphasized where we don’t have commonalities. We came together to talk about how to use Cityspan, and then said, “Here’s the best we understand about quality for improving programs.” The five partners immediately agreed to create a framework to define quality, how to measure it, and how to improve it.
Strengths and Challenges
This anecdote exemplifies the transparent communication that exists in a bureaucratized set of organizations. How this work is done effectively across complex institutions can be explained partly by the authority given to the leadership group by the heads of the partnering organization and the strong norms within the Leadership Group. The Leadership Group meets about every six to eight weeks and has two rules: “Rule #1 – you attend, not somebody else; Rule #2 – if at least two leadership group members cannot make the meeting, the meeting doesn’t happen.” 
This mutual accountability at the Leadership Group level has developed to the point that the group is now crafting a formal, legal agreement to institutionalize the partnership, which will necessarily take a different form from the Wallace-funded Out-of-School Time Project.
Another strength of the Out-of-School Time Project is its developing role as an advocate for increased funding for afterschool programs. There is a coordinated advocacy campaign to identify a stable funding stream at the state level for afterschool. The leadership of the Out-of-School Time Project, in partnership with other organizations, is working on drafting legislation for Summer 2010 and galvanizing public support for that legislation.
One of the significant challenges for the Out-of-School Time Project is around how the programs of the participating institutions will interact. For example, up to now, the work around program improvement has been primarily internal. One Leadership Group member asked,
How is the Park District working on program quality? Libraries? We haven’t been able to move to connecting the work in a [Community School Initiative participating] school to the nearby park or library. We’re not there yet. We’re trying to get there.
A shooting tragedy in Chicago in which a teenager was brutally killed in 2009 led the city of Chicago to increase funding for programs to decrease youth violence in the city. Afterschool programs for teens will be a major piece of that response, but a leadership group member wondered: “What do we do as a partnership? We have a citywide system. What do we do?”
Taking Partnerships to Scale
Partners are playing ever more significant roles in school districts, as described in our studies of New Orleans and Chicago, as well as in Boston, described in the article “Beyond Human Resources: Human Capital Development for Scale and Sustainability,” by Joanne Thompson, Tracie Potochnik, and Ellen Foley, in this issue of VUE. They play critical roles in making connections possible between all the resources a city can bring to support child and youth development. But as we have also seen from the examples above, partnerships are far from simple.
Because the New Orleans system of education is fragmented, individual schools and the various school systems are often individually accessing external partners to support local reform. This could create a dynamic where there is a competitive market for services, instead of a collaborative environment that fosters partnerships.
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Research on Leadership Inside and Outside Formal School Systems | |
| MEREDITH I. HONIG Professor, College of Education, and senior fellow, Center for Educational Leadership, University of Washington–Seattle [Our study “‘External’ Organiza-tions and the Politics of Urban Educational Leadership”] is one in a growing line of research that challenges scholars of educational leadership to expand the traditional scope of our own field from examining mainly school-level leadership to truly focusing on |
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———————– Excerpted from Honig, Meredith I. 2009. “‘External’ Organizations and the Politics of Urban Educational Leadership: The Case of New Small Autonomous Schools Initiatives,” Peabody Journal of Education 84, no. 3:394–413. > Available online > Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group. |
In Chicago, longstanding external partners have developed working collaborative relationships with a single school system. Chicago’s cross-sector partnerships through the Out-of-School Time Project and Community School Initiative operate in the context of a mostly intact public school system that educates the vast majority of young people in the city. These examples demonstrate important aspects of a smart education system through the efficacy of their collaborative work and the central role that data play in creating shared ownership and commitment to partnership.
Partnerships between schools, districts, civic and community organizations, elected officials, and other stakeholders are needed to support young people’s learning and development of a broad range of outcomes, both inside and outside of school – especially in historically under-served communities. There is much to learn from both cities as they continue to develop the supports that can bring quality teaching and learning to scale.
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Footnotes
1 For more details about the governance of the New Orleans public school system after Katrina, see “New Orleans: The Challenges of Equity and Scale,” by Alethea Frazier Raynor, in this issue of VUE.
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References
A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. 2008. A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Main BBA Statement. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.
> Available online
DeWulf, A., L. Mills, R. Levitan, M. Macht, N. Afonso, J. Avegno, and T. Mills. 2007. “Prevalence of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Following Hurricane Katrina,” Abstract #337, 2007 SAEM Annual Meeting Abstracts, Annual Meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, May 16–19, Chicago.
Time, Learning, And Afterschool Task Force. 2007. A New Day for Learning: A Report from the Time, Learning, And Afterschool Task Force. Flint, MI: Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
> Available for download
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