Report
Challenges and Potential of a Collaborative Approach to Education Reform
Sep 8, 2004
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Can collaboratives achieve improved student-performance outcomes? In Challenges and Potential of a Collaborative Approach to Education Reform, RAND researchers evaluated whether the 1998 Ford Foundation Collaborating for Education Reform Initiative (CERI) was meeting its goals of helping community-based organizations and central district offices in eight urban centers build collaborative partnerships to promote and sustain educational improvement in the public schools. Findings are presented along five dimensions, and differences in progress are traced to factors important in creating collaboratives themselves.
In attempting to create an educational system that promotes and ensures high standards for all students, policymakers have reached for both old and new policy levers (such as standards, incentives, and choice options) to create and sustain organizational improvement. One newer lever is the creation of community-based collaborations to sustain education reforms across the chaotic conditions often associated with switches in district superintendents. A RAND Corporation study reported in Challenges and Potential of a Collaborative Approach to Education Reform looks at one such attempt and draws out lessons that can benefit further efforts to use collaboration as a tool for improving a community's schools.
In 1998, the Ford Foundation launched a new initiative, Collaborating for Education Reform Initiative (CERI), to help community-based organizations and central district offices in several urban centers build collaborative partnerships among these organizations whose purpose would be to promote and sustain educational improvement in the public schools. The urban centers included Cataño, Puerto Rico; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Denver, Colorado; the District of Columbia (DC); Jackson, Mississippi; Miami-Dade, Florida; San Antonio, Texas; and Santa Ana, California.
The foundation asked the collaboratives to build interorganizational linkages, such as joint planning, joint implementation of reform activities, or pooling of resources to more effectively achieve reform goals, and to work jointly with a cluster of schools (a high school and the elementary and middle schools whose students feed into it) to increase the effectiveness of the teacher professional-development offerings; to align the standards, curriculum, and instruction across grade levels; and to improve community involvement in the schools. These activities were expected to result in changes in classroom-level teaching and learning, eventually improving student outcomes. In addition, the foundation asked that the collaboratives attempt to make changes in the policy structure within their districts to ensure that these cluster-level activities were sustained and to eventually become financially independent of the foundation.
The composition and focus of the eight collaboratives differed substantially across the sites. At the time the initial grants were awarded, the number of collaborative members ranged from five in one site to 19 in another and included local colleges and universities; community-based organizations, such as local foundations and advocacy groups for school reform; educators; parents; and concerned citizens. By design, the award amounts of $300,000 per year were not intended to fund a districtwide reform effort. Rather, the funds were intended for use by the collaboratives to help produce a stronger, more consistent focus on reform. Collaboratives used the funding in different ways: for example, for meetings and development of collaborative plans, for helping schools develop improvement plans, for professional development in the cluster schools, for training parents as organizers and increasing community involvement, and for newsletters and research.
In fall 1999, RAND began an evaluation of the effort. The evaluation had three goals: to provide feedback to sites to improve their efforts; to provide information to the Ford Foundation that would inform its decisions about support and funding provided to sites; and to document for the public the challenges and possible successes of this approach to improvement. A new report by Bodilly and colleagues, Challenges and Potential of a Collaborative Approach to Education Reform, presents the results of this evaluation four years into the effort and offers some important lessons regarding collaboration as a strategy for sustaining reform.
The researchers examined the progress made by the sites along five dimensions: development of interorganizational linkages, development and implementation of cluster-level activities, development and implementation of plans for changes in policy to sustain the cluster activities, achievement of independence by the collaborative, and achievement of changes in student outcomes.
Much of the difference in progress could be traced to the difficulties of creating collaboratives themselves. The following are factors that proved to be important in these eight sites:
Although, in some sites, progress was made and collaboratives developed, none of the collaboratives achieved the improved student-performance outcomes that the foundation desired. The researchers conclude that collaboration-building is an uncertain process, but one with at least some significant promise for improving our schools.
The likelihood of greater effectiveness of this approach might be improved by the following: careful choice of leads; strong planning, coordination, and communication among the parties in the early stages of formation; greater technical assistance to the collaboratives in the form of help with data gathering, strategic needs assessment, and planning; and more-routine convenings of all the sites together to improve the valuable exchange of practices and approaches.
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