Urban University-Partnered Schools: Sites of Innovation or Sites of Exception?

• In Event: University-School Partnerships: Building on What We Know in the Service of Students and Families

Abstract

University-assisted schools are a special variant of university-school partnerships, usually spawned from a well-defined, co-constructed, or shared perspective of goals and expectations. Presenters for this commentary are researchers in northeastern institutions of higher education and teachers and parents from a focal school who have been involved with an ongoing study of university-school-community partnerships developed around multiple issues: health, pedagogy and practice, and student learning. The commentary will draw upon data from a study that documented change in a university-assisted school; in the nature and scope of engagement across the university, school, and community; and in students’, families’, and communities’ sense of change. The presentation will focus on what has been learned in this partnership; with what expectations, accommodations, and outcomes; and with what definitions and enactments of change for the public good. Presenters will map the historical context of the school’s evolution against the current context, positioning issues of authority; co-construction of ideas, design, and implementation; intentionality; and sustainability while examining the ways in which change is occurring in the school, university, and community.

Data were collected from four sources: (1) interviews with a stratified random sampling of current and former students, teachers, parents, community leaders and members, and officials from the school district, teacher union, and the university; (2) analysis of achievement and related student data by grade level; (3) archival data on the (re)structuring of the school; and (4) GIS mapping of demographic shifts in the neighborhood of the school. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Data were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative analyses. First, although the overall assessment of teachers, parents, and students was that the partnership offers the school, teachers, and students many opportunities, there was variability in perceptions across participant groups and in relationship to class and race. For example, White parents who were typically middle-class were initially more critical than Black parents who varied across class, but who when probed, expressed concerns about feeling marginalized often. Similarly, the comments of Black children and other children of color about educational opportunities and resources available in school were more positive than those of white children from middle-income homes. Additionally, teachers, parents, and students differed, often significantly, in their interpretation of diversity and its advantages for the school. Teachers were consistent in their view of two themes: (1) the racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity of the school as its greatest resource and (2) the positive academic outcomes experienced by the students. The data point to the inherent complexities of establishing and sustaining a rigorous academic and community-focused school. They raise questions about the ways in which University-partnered and assisted schools situated in urban communities challenge common (mis)perceptions about public schools, whether and how the schools are perceived—as sites of innovation and possibility or exceptions, how place is defined and repositioned in these partnerships, and how if at all the partnerships contribute to the social economies and community cultures in which the schools are located.

Authors

• Vivian L. Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania

• Mary Yee, University of Pennsylvania

• Susan Bickerstaff, Teachers College, Columbia University