Collaborating for Equity: Comprehensive School Reform in an Innovative University/School Partnership

• In Event: 16.017 - Partnerships for School Reform in Urban Education: Models, Dynamics, and Challenges

Abstract

As a New York State approved Educational Partnership Organization (EPO), we are embarking on a bold experiment: to transform a comprehensive, public, open enrollment urban high school with dismal student outcomes into a viable choice of excellence for urban families. EPO partnerships are unique legal reforms (Education Law 211e, 2014) that position a school as a “district within a district” with its own superintendent and unprecedented control over all aspects of running a school. Data are drawn from a long-term ethnography of this partnership, now in its second year. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of comprehensive transformation of educational infrastructure and practices on changing school culture. Educational researchers know what essential supports are needed to improve school culture or climate (Roderick, Easton, & Sebring, 2009), but we know less about how specifically to make those changes and what those changes mean to the school community. This paper examines the impact of comprehensive reform on the initiative’s goal to change from a culture of underachievement and negativity toward a culture of collaboration and excellence.
To understand and interpret the data, we used an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that draws on theories of distributed leadership, culture, and power. A theory of distributed leadership requires a shift from emphasizing the work of an individual leader towards acknowledging and validating, as a collective, the work of multiple individuals within the school (Spillane, 2008; Spillane, Camburn, Pustejovsky, Pareja, & Lewis 2008; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001). We theorize culture as practices that are mutually constituted between people as they participate in valued activities (Duranti, 1997). To understand how social and power relations are transformed as the culture changes over time, we use Foucault’s (1990/1978) concept of power as a complex set of force relations in which power produces. Foucault specifically notes that power produces both oppressive and positive relations. We use an analytics of power that traces how relations are transformed given our understanding of distributed leadership and culture as participation in activity.
The larger study from which data are drawn is ethnography. The full data corpus gathered during the first two years of the EPO includes field notes of participant observation in classrooms, leadership and staff meetings, and a co-teaching experience in a 9th grade English class, formal and informal interviews with study participants, school wide statistical data, emails, documents (including lesson and unit plans, newspaper articles, meeting minutes, etc.), video of co-teaching, research and teaching memos, photographs, and surveys. Analyses reveal that power produces generative frictions that animate culture change. These generative frictions are not binaries, nor are they oppositional; they are in relation to each other, mutually constitutive, and fluid. The paper will present key frictions identified and their impact on changing school culture. The partnership at the center of this paper is the first partnership of this kind in New York, providing a timely opportunity to understand the transformation of a struggling school in danger of closing into a successful model of urban education reform.

Author

• Joanne C. Larson, University of Rochester