Improving America's Schools Together

This volume brings together a dream author team—a mix of scholars and scholarly professionals with complementary research and practice-based expertise who have figured out how to work productively together in research-practice partnerships. Their contributions provide inspiration and concrete guidance for educational leaders in schools, districts, and institutions of higher education. The rich cases of higher education–school district partnership reveal innovative structures and collaborative practices that enable joint work to build capacity for continuous improvement in service of creating more effective and equitable systems. For all these reasons and more, this book is on the cutting edge of the continuous improvement movement in education and is a must-read for educators seeking to transform U.S. education and create equitable learning opportunities for students. -- Jennifer Lin Russell, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University
Leaders in public and higher education are facing unprecedented calls to advance quality and equity in students’ educational opportunities and outcomes. This volume provides remarkable perspective on the power of districts and universities learning together—in partnerships and in community—to do more, for more students, than either could possibly do on their own. It serves as both a call and a blueprint for action, with the contributing authors inviting district and university leaders to follow in their footsteps to forge institutional change. -- Donald J. Peurach, Marsal Family School of Education, University of Michigan
What excites me about this edited volume is that it provides illustrations of partnerships that are making an impact in education! It exists as a useful tool for individuals seeking images of the possible in co-designing and co-implementing partnerships that work. And, ultimately, it demonstrates the power of collaboration—that the future of education is through partnership, by tackling persistent problems of practice together. It shows that schools and universities are truly better together. -- Rebecca West Burns, Bill Herrold Endowed Professor, director of Clinical Practice and Educational Partnerships, College of Education and Human Services, University of North Florida
These cases provide wonderful, concrete examples of how district-university partnerships for continuous improvement can benefit both school districts and schools of education. Anyone interested in engaging in such partnerships should read this book, especially to identify the benefits, but also to get a sense of the challenges such partnerships face. -- William Firestone, Rutgers University, Graduate School of Education (retired)
Gomez, Biag, Imig, Tozer, and Hitz bring together powerful examples of how—through thoughtful and deliberate continuous improvement processes—partnerships can be formed to address complex problems of practice in our schools. This text will quickly become a go-to guide for those seeking to engage in equity-focused and contextually relevant collaborations designed to address public school challenges and to develop sustainable and impactful solutions. -- Karen L. Sanzo, Old Dominion University
This book contains cases of district-university partnerships anchored in continuous improvement tools and methods. The book shows how those partnerships formed, catalyzed, integrated efforts, and facilitated organizational change. The multi-case approach is invaluable as a teaching resource because it enables learning conversations and coaching practice. -- Ben Cooper, California State University, Fullerton
This text is full of pragmatic and versatile lessons on continuous improvement in education. I'm not a believer in 'one size fits all' methodologies, so improvement science cannot be a panacea to all education research initiatives. But where evaluation and other important traditional social science research methods stop short of actually fixing problems, improvement science can indeed transform practice through innovation, collaboration, and learning from data. The book covers a variety of common and unique education problems as well as how the continuous-improvement paradigm can be applied in context. Just as healthcare and other vital human service fields have embraced it, education must as well. -- Dane Joseph, George Fox University
The idea that school district-university partnerships for educator preparation should be mutually-beneficial is almost universally acknowledged, but often poorly articulated by practitioners when asked to provide evidence of such a partnership. If you’ve wondered what 'mutually beneficial and co-constructed partnerships' look like in practice and how they can be authentic and sustainable over time, this book is for you. With one fell swoop, it silences those resistant to change who wield the argument that 'it can't happen here' as their justification for not innovating. -- Sean Kottke, PhD, Office of Educator Excellence, Michigan Department of Education
Blending the expertise of researchers and practitioners with the use of case studies, this book will be valuable for universities and school districts who want to deepen their partnership work and to see what this work looks like ‘in real life.’ -- Corrie Stone-Johnson, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York; editor-in-chief, Journal of Educational Change
This volume brings together a number of the most important applied thinkers and doers about complex education partnerships active today. The editors are seasoned education researchers who also share an extensive background with using improvement science. Their necessary communication to co-create this volume has proven to be highly generative with each pushing the next to new insights shared and needed detail added, to the benefit of the reader. -- Edmund "Ted" Hamann, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; chair, Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) Council of Delegates; AERA Fellow
This text provides examples of how IHEs can move to research partnerships instead of coming in and doing research on a particular problem and having the school’s main function be as a participant. I highly recommend this text for school districts and institutions of higher education that want to form a partnership through the lens of improvement science. All IHEs should be training their candidates in school district administration on improvement science and how forming these partnerships not only improve outcomes for students in schools but also create equitable leaders that will be transforming schools and communities in which they are employed. -- Tori L. Colson, EdD, University of Southern Indiana
This important text provides a multifaceted examination and discussion of partnerships between PK–12 school districts and universities using real life examples from existing impactful partnerships across the US. The stories and lessons shared in each chapter can serve as a blueprint for others interested in forming similar partnerships with the aim of transforming their surrounding PK–12 educational community. -- Christopher Benedetti, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
University-district partnerships have been hot topics for many years now. Many funding organizations look for this kind of partnership to ensure that research is done with and for Local Education Agencies (LEAs), versus being done on them. Improving America's Schools Together supports those who want to build partnership with universities or LEAs with some 'how to' information. Partnerships are not easy. However, this book demonstrates how improvement science is a rigorous but user-friendly way to get all stakeholders on the same page to do research in the name of making schools better. It showcases the tools of improvement, one of which is the charter—a formal, co-constructed document that establishes the partnership. Such tools offer the reader an understanding of what building a partnership looks like and what is needed to sustain it in different contexts with different foci. Each case is co-written by a university faculty member and educational practitioner, which supports the notion of university-district partnerships and decolonizes who owns and produces knowledge. This book is a useful contribution to practitioners—both K–12 and university—as they consider venturing into similar work. -- Jill A. Perry, PhD, Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate
This book is a two for one—it discusses improving the content of the leadership development programs as well as the outcomes of the school-university partnerships required to make leadership development effective. What’s unique about this book is the discussion of improving leadership development and partnership using improvement science methods. The authors have actively used the methods discussed and have engaged in the partnerships themselves. I especially appreciate their documentation of iLEAD, an important effort to strengthening university-school district partnerships focused on leadership development. I highly recommend this book for people working in on improvement in the field of education from both practice and research roles and organizations. -- Laura Wentworth, director of research practice partnerships, California Education Partners
This book captures multiple stories of how institutions of higher education can come alongside school districts to tackle complex problems of practice. Each case provides insight into how diverse actors and partners negotiate and engage in the trading zones and boundaries of policies, practices, programs, and processes to reimagine how we continuously improve schools but how we prepare educators and educational leaders to lead and work together. -- Edwin Nii Bonney, Radford University
Here’s a must-read volume for those building new disruptive relationships between IHEs and LEAs. Case studies tell examples of intentional, sustainable partnerships. They are held together through the mutual use of and belief in improvement science and continuous improvement; a leadership network; and efforts to develop mutualism through boundary spanners and braiders. Don’t miss the excellent introduction by Tony Bryk and the conclusion by Louis Gomez. -- John Q. Easton, University of Chicago, UChicago Consortium on School Research
This text is compelling in that it presents both varied, well-documented examples of effective, enduring partnerships and also provides a concise and clear conceptual framework for those cases. Readers seeking to evaluate or create similar inter-institutional partnerships have the proof of concept and the conceptual guidance needed to do so. At the same time—and this is crucial—the framework does not float above the particulars, but rather it starts from the premise that context matters as the foundation for successful joint work. It is both an ideal leadership and policy course text and a very practical guide for those involved in the work of partnerships. -- Mark LaCelle-Peterson, president and CEO, Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation