Co-construction: A facilitator for school reform in school, community and university partnerships

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 2001 by Carroll, Grace, LaPoint, Velma, Tyler, Kenneth

Examples of School, Community, and University Partnerships

The literature is replete with examples of school, community, and university partnerships that have been reported as successful. Those reported here are a small sample of the several hundred partnerships throughout the nation.

School and Homes as Partners in Education (SHAPE) Project. SHAPE, a partnership between the Plattsburgh City School District and the State University of New York (SUNY) at Plattsburgh, NY, seeks to improve student academic achievement and social competence. SHAPE, an extended school day program, was created by a partnership of teachers, family members in the Chapter 1 Parent Council, the Plattsburgh City School District superintendent, and SUNY students, faculty, and administrators. Graduate students, who taught in local schools and several reading teachers, contributed to developing, implementing, and evaluating the project (Edwards, Abel, Easton, Herbster, & Sparapani, 1996).

University West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC). WEPIC is another example of a school, community, and university partnership. It started in 1985 in an honors history seminar, "Urban Universities-Community Relationships: Penn-West Philadelphia, Past, Present and Future, as a Case Study," with four students' research proposal to create a youth corps serving the Philadelphia community. It is coordinated by the West Philadelphia Partnership which is a non-profit community-based organization composed of institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, neighborhood organizations and the Philadelphia school district. As a year-round program involving approximately 7,000 children, their parents, and community members, it provides educational and cultural programs, recreation, job training, community improvement, and service activities. The education program supports extended-day and weekend programs that are taught by public school teachers, community members, and university faculty, staff, and students. Recently a national foundation provided funds to replicate the WEPIC program at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, the University of Alabama, and Miami University at Cincinnati.

Taking Stock/Making Change (TSMC). TSMC is another school, community, partnership that includes the Philadelphia School District, the Center for Urban Ethnography (CUE), and the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at the University of Pennsylvania (Erickson & Christman, 1996). TSMC assists a school-based team of stakeholders to use ethnographic research to examine current issues in their schools and to chart new directions for improved student outcomes. The program was designed to support schools as they moved toward school-based management and shared governance. The entire school was considered the unit of change and the processes of change were determined collaboratively by school stakeholders including students, school personnel, family members, university faculty, and graduate students. CUE developed a school-based evaluation as opposed to a traditional evaluation of the district's newly reformed school-based management. The traditional evaluation approach typically positions the University as an outside research institution. In the school-based evaluation with the five partnership schools, GSE faculty and graduate students conducted both ethnographic and quantitative evaluation strategies. Schoolbased stakeholders valued the ethnographic school reform data and noted different kinds of evidence that had not been used before (Erickson & Christman, 1996).