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The Multifocus Partnership (MFP) was one of the most complex and ambitious partnerships funded by the EPP. It encompassed a small city, the county surrounding it, the school districts of the city and county, a county education office, an organization that represented the largest employers in the area, the local university, a more distant university, health agencies, civic groups, and an organization that provided training to both union and management of the city's largest employer. Its goals were to bring about educational reform throughout city and county schools and to use the reform in the context of economic development. The MFP itself served as a broad umbrella under which a wide variety of partnerships between individual schools or school districts and businesses and community agencies were covered.
The case study of the MFP is included not only because the MFP is a successful example of using the concept of educational partnerships to bring about broad systemic change, but also because it illustrates the difficulties in doing so. The MFP struggled with process and focus during its first two years, but was able to solve the problems it encountered and get on a course that holds great promise, according to those involved.
One result of the struggles of the MFP were important lessons to the field. These include:
The very success of the MFP raises a fundamental issue inherent in a broad community partnership: Each organization (including the City School District (CSD), the city, the large business organization, and the county school districts) had a representative on the MFP Council. As a result, the "votes" of a county district and the city school district were equal. The area's demographics are much like the demographics in other communities, with a large ethnic minority and poor population in the city, surrounded by more affluent white suburbs. The structure of the partnership has a tendency, then, to dilute the political power of the elected school board and mayor of the city. As will be seen, some choices of program focus seem to reflect this dilution of influence. This fundamental issue will be discussed further in the conclusion of the case study.
The MFP is a complex partnership with many participants who comprise the Community Forum. Its goal was to create systemic change in the CSD and city and other county schools. The County Education Agent was the fiscal agent for the EPP grant. Active participants include businesses (mainly through an organization that represents the largest businesses in the county), social service agencies, health providers (including the local hospital), and two universities. As the partnership began, the major activities were concentrated in the one area of the city and included an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. By the end of EPP funding, the area's high school was the site of fewer partnership activities, and the Forum was active throughout the county as well as in developing districtwide policy for the CSD and activities in both county and city schools.
Community commitment to the Forum is high, as indicated by the use of federal funds for activities and locally generated funds for staff. Local funds include in-kind contributions, including the contribution of a full-time administrative assistant, for Forum staff, money for a large portion of the project director's salary, assignment of a program staff member from the business council to Forum activities, and donation of space for Forum offices from a local union. In addition, a community foundation supported Forum activities, particularly a series of community meetings about education that were used to increase support for school reform. The Forum supported the successful preparation of a grant application to an out-of-state foundation to support a program that would be a pilot for an integrated services approach. The use of Forum facilities to leverage additional funds increased the credibility of the Forum in the community.
Structurally, the Forum itself comprises high-level representatives of almost 60 organizations, businesses, governmental entities, school districts, and community-based organizations. It met annually, and, after two years of EPP funding, formed a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization. The Forum was supported by a broader Work Team, which included representatives from the Forum Executive Committee as well as midlevel managers and community representatives. The Work Team met weekly at first, moving to meeting every other week when partnership activities were well implemented.
The Work Team sponsored three subcommittees, each of which had representatives from business, schools, and social and health service agencies. One subcommittee focused on the transition from school to work, a second on developing coordinated social and health services, and the third on reform within schools. The educational reform subcommittee built directly on work of the more distant university and includes PDSs. The health and social service subcommittee supported the preparation of the integrated services grant application and has developed school-based health programs in additional CSD schools. The school-to-work transition subcommittee is the locus of activity involving reform of vocational education in the CSD and the county vo-tech school, as well as other school-to-work transition activities in several county schools, including a high technology-oriented program in a remote suburb.
During the third year of the EPP grant, the Forum sponsored a series of community meetings that focused on the impact of the demands of the onewo workplace on educational institutions.
The Forum gained much publicity about the meetings, including an annual follow-up series on area schools in the local newspaper.
The Forum brought together several separate educationally oriented efforts that already were in progress in the CSD or county schools. As such, the Forum served as an umbrella for almost all activities that involve schools with nonschool agencies. In addition, the Forum provided funding for activities at selected CSD schools, for CSD district-level activities, and for model programs throughout the county.
The city is a prototypical rust-belt city. It was hit hard by the economic recession of the late 1980s, losing jobs and population as a result. The city has benefited from the general economic upturn, but the increase in jobs does not match what once existed. Perhaps as important as the general depression in the city economy is the sense that most Forum participants believe that things will never be what they were. From their perspective, the industries that once supported the community will never grow to what they once were. The combination of increased automation and global competition seems to them to add up to the need to change the community's economic base. However, the large companies involved in the Forum represent the old ways, and their concern is to ensure that they have a well-trained labor force. Clearly, these two perspectives on the economy both support efforts to reform education.
Demographically, the city and county share characteristics with most metropolitan areas. The city's population, particularly its school population, is largely African American and poor while most county school districts are white and middle class. A few inner suburban schools serve high numbers of African American students.
The traditional leadership of the city is engaged in several activities to foster collaboration with the goal of reviving the city. During SWRL's first site visit, one respondent said: "You sat in on a meeting this morning that had us interacting with 25-30 people and those 25-30 people are in large measures similar, not totally, but similar to the composition of the Forum. Then we have a third initiative...that also is a community-based merging effort to address children and family problems." Another talked of "12 to 19 people who meet in different settings on overlapping issues." Over the course of the three years, both the number of individuals involved in the variety of organizations concerned with reviving the city and the activities sponsored by the various groups increased, but the overlap in membership and the shared commitment remained high. In short, the city's leadership is committed to working together to revive it. The overlapping membership in the various initiatives indicates not only the commitment of traditional leadership, but also the small size of the leadership group.
Less significant for the city--but important for understanding the Forum is the historic role of a national foundation based in the city. The presence of this important source of funds for education and other community activities created an innovative atmosphere in the city. However, school officials came to rely on foundation funds, and when the foundation diminished its focus on the city, they tended to look at all innovation with some degree of cynicism or doubt about its efficacy.
The Forum developed from three distinct events in the city, and the three events remained influential in how the Forum was structured. All participants agreed the grant application resulted from the recognition that the city was in trouble and that some type of collaborative activity would be useful. However, the motivation for joining the effort varied, depending on the event that spurred interest in joining forces around schooling issues.
A large number of participating businesses were influenced by a study sponsored by the business council in the year prior to the announcement of the availability of EPP funds. They studied the CSD and the students they were preparing and found that the potential labor pool was inadequate to the needs of the current and future workplace. Students were preparing (if at all) for well-paid, low-skilled jobs that no longer existed. The members of the health and human services committee were galvanized by a report on the condition of children in the city released by a communitywide policy-oriented organization that had equally dismal findings related to health and welfare. Educators, particularly in the county education office, were concerned that neither city nor county schools were sufficiently involved in the educational reform movement.
The Forum became the locus for all three concerns, and their ongoing influence was reflected in the development of the three subcommittees, each charged to address one of the issues.
The MFP encompasses organizations that had worked together prior to the founding of the Forum as well as the activities on which they worked. For example, the PDS at the middle school was a collaborative effort of the school and the remote university that was brought under the umbrella of the Forum.
The grant application was prepared at the county education office, with significant input from leaders of the business council and health policy group. They decided to include existing school-related efforts in the partnership. This decision led the proposal developers to look closely at one area of the CSD, in which the elementary school already housed a preschool program and had an active parent involvement program and the middle school was a PDS. As a matter of strategy, the proposal preparation group decided that the Forum should sponsor additional school-based activities, reflecting the three concerns, and that these activities should then be disseminated to additional city and county schools. This strategy later was referred to by participants as a "retail" strategy because it focused on change on a school-by-school basis.
Another early decision was the choice of the executive director of the Forum. The man selected was one with long-standing ties in the community. He had been an educator and then, later, a school board member. Almost as important, his family was closely tied with the national foundation based in the city. He was well-known and well-liked.
The executive director believed that the organizers of the Forum were strong individuals who represented strong and committed organizations. His leadership style was facilitative. That is, he sought to find consensus about the activities the Forum would undertake. He believed that two distinct motivations brought participants into the Forum: Some participants were concerned largely with developing in-school models for educational change, believing that spreading such models were an effective way to spread improved educational opportunities; another group focused primarily on the role of education in economic development. Although these two views are not mutually exclusive, the practical result was that the former group believed that the models developed in the targeted area should be such that they could readily--and quickly--be exported to county schools, while the latter group saw the city as having the greatest need for economic development and, therefore, did not think concern about the county schools should be central to the Forum's decisions. The executive director worked behind the scenes to find areas of agreement, avoiding conflict among Forum members.
During the first year of the MFP, the conflict simmered beneath the surface. Forum members were frustrated that their involvement seemed, in the words of many, "to lead nowhere." The school-based programs in the high school were particularly problematic, with many missed communications among Forum staff, high school staff, and the business community. More important, however, was the frustration of leaders of the two views of the MFP. The educator wanted some products, and the business council leader wanted greater workplace preparation. Only the health community was satisfied with the Forum, largely because of its support for the successful integrated services grant.
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[Multifocus Partnership Part B]
This page was last updated January 8, 2002 (jca)