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The discussion of the implementation of the MFP that follows focuses on the changes in how the Forum worked during the course of EPP funding. It begins with an analysis of the MFP's structure and processes, particularly the changing leadership style that accompanied a change in the executive director. The second part includes a discussion of the activities the Forum was involved with and how they changed over time.
The Forum serves as an umbrella under which the MFP and other educational partnership activities were gathered. There are 60 members representing businesses (including the Chamber of Commerce); health care providers; other social service agencies; educational institutions (including the CSD, the local community college, the county school office; the local university; a more remote university; unions; the local community foundations; community-based organizations; and religious organizations. Forum members are the chief executive officers of the organizations that belong. The Forum met at least annually and set the broad objectives for the project. The Forum formed as a 501c(3) not-for-profit organization during its second year in existence.
Much of the work of the MFP takes place through the Work Group. The Work Group comprises the executive committee of the Forum as well as midlevel managers from businesses and health and human service agencies, teachers, principals, administrators, and community representatives. The Work Group met weekly during the first two years of the MFP, and then decreased the intensity of its interactions.
Members of the Work Group lead three subcommittees, which include representatives from the community, schools, businesses, and health and human service organizations. The education subcommittee is responsible mainly for in-school reform efforts, including the implementation of PDSs. The school-to-work transition subcommittee is concerned with the transition from school to work. And the health and human services subcommittee focuses on providing comprehensive health and human services to families in the CSD. Each of these sponsors activities related to its mission.
When the MFP began, the Forum and the Work Group were dominated by white middle class members, reflecting the focus on upper and middle management and the demographics of the community. African Americans represented the city government, the CSD, and the community college. Early on, some members of the Work Group were uncomfortable with the fact that their group did not reflect community demographics. As a result, they added an individual who represented the churches and one from a parent organization.
When the Forum began, the executive director consulted with key members of the Forum and the Work Team. His style was to visit the members individually to find out their concerns and interests. His goal was to facilitate the consensus, and the one-on-one meetings were designed to help him find areas of agreement so the underlying tensions among visions for the Forum would not disrupt the development of activities. The result was that problems and disagreements might surface at a Work Group meeting but were not discussed. Rather, the executive director would attempt to talk with those who disagreed before the next meeting of the group.
This facilitative leadership style, in which the executive director acted to carry out the Forum's and Work Group's wishes and to find areas of agreement, left many participants frustrated by the lack of progress. They felt positively about the successes of the group, such as winning the integrated services grant, but were concerned that many problems were emerging in the high school and that other activities were slow to get going. The first solution to the sense of lack of progress was to hire someone to provide technical assistance for group decisionmaking. In a series of retreats, the Forum worked with the outside facilitator to focus its efforts and to make plans for the subsequent years. At first, the technical assistance seemed to solve the problems, but dissatisfaction soon reemerged.
By the end of the second year of the MFP, the executive director announced his retirement. Although many Forum participants missed him as a friend, most saw his retirement as an opportunity to revitalize their efforts. The school-to-work transition subcommittee had been working with a young woman who was new to the community. She came to the city to develop programs that fit current thinking about the demands of the workplace and how schools should respond. Her high energy, commitment to educational reform to enhance economic development, close contact with key intellectuals concerned with work force development, and involvement in national political networks made her a prime candidate for executive director. Her approach to consensus was to work actively to develop it.
Although the new executive director's major concern was the transition from school to work, she saw the other problems facing the Forum. For example, she believed all school reform required basic structural change at the district level. Without changed policies and support, she thought, no educational reform would last or spread. Calling this a wholesale approach, she worked closely with the county education office and the school district to develop structures that would support widespread school reform. The analogy was to marketing, and the Forum became the supplier of ideas, policies, and practices that enabled the school districts to deliver reform to schools. For example, the CSD had already committed itself to outcomes-based education, and the executive director provided support for developing the outcomes required from vocational education, her major area of interest. These became the policies that changed curriculum, instruction, and assessment at all schools in the city. She also provided an arena in which the CSD could gather information and advice related to other concerns, including increasing the number of professional development schools and improving preschool and primary education.
In addition to intervening at the school district level, the executive director believed that it was necessary to educate the community about the new demands on education. Therefore, she convinced the Forum to sponsor a series of community meetings.
The executive director also was attuned to the internal politics of the Forum. She understood that the county office of education was unhappy that the original idea of developing model programs in the city and spreading them to the county was not working. The new wholesale approach to school reform implied that county school districts also would need to change district policies and practices. Consequently, working closely with the school-to-work subcommittee, particularly the representative of the business council, she identified county school districts that were interested in being the site of Forum activities. She also helped find matching funds to carry out those activities.
As a result of her changed approach to Forum policies and practices, participants' satisfaction increased. The representative from the business council became convinced that focusing business efforts on areas that the Forum saw as essential to school reform would enhance the impact of their activities. The first step in ensuring that the Forum was the focal point for business activity related to education was to gain the commitment from the largest employer in the area, which had a foundation, to use the Forum as the foundation board. That is, the employer foundation gave the Forum the authority to recommend how it should distribute its funds. This decision ensured the Forum's role as leader of educational reform.
Although the formal structure of the MFP did not change, the policies and processes it used to make decisions did. The new executive director gained the support of key members of the Forum and both focused and expanded the Forum's role.
The Forum began with a number of activities already in place that it brought under the MFP umbrella. During the first years of the partnership, efforts were made to develop additional activities at three schools in one area of the city. Some of these were successful, but the work at the high school led to much frustration on the part of Forum and Work Group members as well as teachers and administrators in the school. Following the change of executive director, MFP activities changed, and schools in the county as well as in the city were the locus of reform efforts.
This section begins with a description of the activities that the Forum drew under its umbrella. It then moves to a discussion and analysis of the activities the Forum began or encouraged at the start of the MFP. The section ends with the activities that are continuing under the auspices of the Forum.
The MFP brought existing activities that involved multiple organizations under the Forum's aegis. Such activities existed in the CSD elementary and middle school that were the focus of early Forum activities. The elementary school had long run a well-regarded preschool program. It also had an active parent group, whose efforts were directed at such matters as working with parents to help them ease children's transition between preschool and kindergarten. The preschool and parent program became major elements in the education subcommittee's activities at the school.
The middle school had two major sets of activities that predated the establishment of the Forum. One, which had begun with foundation funding but was well-integrated into the school when the MFP began, was a school-to-work transition program that focused on health careers. As such, it captured the interest of both the school-to-work and health and human services subcommittees. Through the career-oriented program, students visited local health facilities, could work with health professionals as mentors, and, in general explored health careers. The links between the local hospitals and other health providers and the middle school were strong. They formed the basis of further Forum activities.
In addition to the career education activities, the middle school was a professional development school, collaborating with the remote university. As a PDS, it was involved in shared decisionmaking at the school site. This changed roles and relationships between teachers and administrators and among teachers. Further, the university placed a cadre of student teachers in the school, and their supervisors served as technical assistants for the entire school staff. The student teachers, school staff, and university supervisors worked together to reorganize teaching and learning at the middle school. The PDS was successful, and the university sought another CSD school to serve in a similar capacity.
The CSD had moved to site-based management, and the proposal for EPP funding highlighted the opportunity to create teams of individuals from business and the schools for staff and organizational development related to site-based management. However, when the Forum and the Work Team met, there was little interest in pursuing such activities.
Once EPP funding was received, the Forum and the Work Team subcommittees began program development. Although the application for the foundation grant for integrated services was submitted through another organization, the Forum provided space for the grant writer. More important, the health and human services subcommittee engaged in brainstorming and reviewed drafts of the application. The grant writer believed that their input was oessential.o Because the MFP and integrated services application were intertwined, the decision to place the pilot effort at the elementary school was easy. Further justification for the placement lay in its existing parent and community outreach activities and the principal's support.
In addition to the integrated services project, the elementary school also developed early career awareness materials under the sponsorship of the school-to-work committee. Teachers and administrators from the school integrated the career awareness into the existing curricula, and teachers received some in-services about the new activities.
Building on the positive relationships between health care providers and the middle school, the health and human services subcommittee decided to establish a school-based health clinic on the grounds of the middle school facility. The school and local providers began planning during the first year of the MFP, and the clinic was operational by the third year. Site administrators and teachers, although not deeply involved in the daily operation of the clinic, valued its presence and referred students and parents to it. Clinic staff became mentors in the health careers program.
The MFP encountered the greatest difficulties in working with the high school. High school teachers expressed concern about the difficulties students were having in making the transition from the middle school to the high school. They wanted to create a school-within-a-school for the students who were experiencing the greatest difficulty. Although the education subcommittee supported the idea, there were problems in getting started. The teachers were promised either release time or compensation and believed that approval of the plan implied approval of compensation. However, the fiscal agent argued that more detailed information was required to justify the expenditure of funds. The teachers expressed anger at having oto jump through hoops,o and although they worked on developing the school-within-a-school, progress was slow.
Even greater problems arose in the development of career-focused academies. The school-to-work subcommittee wholeheartedly embraced the concept of developing several academies, which would be schools-within-a-school, that focused on career paths. The chair of the school-to-work subcommittee was the representative of the business council, and he was enthusiastic about the possibilities. Academy development worked on two tracks. A group of teachers volunteered to plan the school-based portion, and subcommittee members sought internship and mentor placements in the community. The teachers experienced the same problem as did those involved in developing a transition program for high school entrants. That is, they were asked to write, and then rewrite, a formal proposal. They, too, continued work, but slowly. Further, because they worked after school, they reported that their energy levels were too low to make rapid progress.
The subcommittee members were able to find a number of business placements for students and arranged transportation to and from the work sites. However, a newly appointed principal, who had not been involved in the planning, created barriers for students' leaving school. From his perspective, their leaving interrupted the educational program. He also resented the subcommittee chair's incursion on the principal's authority over the school. The combination of slow teacher progress and the principal's reluctance to participate led to great frustration concerning the high school programs. By the end of the second year of the MFP, there seemed little hope that much would happen in the high school. In fact, an assistant principal, who had accepted the assignment to the high school because of the opportunity to work with the Forum, transferred to another school.
Even in the early years of the MFP, some activities took place within the CSD. The Forum supported the district's move to site-based management and outcomes-based education. The most concrete sign of the support lay in the assistance given to improvement in the preschool and primary grades. The Forum provided partial support for one year for a position in the district office to oversee the primary grade reform program. Some members of the education subcommittee wanted to use MFP funds to support organizational and staff development related to the move to site-based management. This was one of the issues, however, on which there was unresolved disagreement.
Many members of the subcommittees, Work Team, and Forum pointed with pride at the activities that fell under the Forum's umbrella. But a small, influential, and growing group believed that progress had stalled. In their eyes, the Forum could be successful with oeasyo activitiesoextending an existing program, adding on a school-based clinic. The failures, they felt, were more important because they signaled the inability of the partnership to grapple with fundamental issues in school reform. In addition, the county education office, which represented districts in the county as well as the CSD, was getting impatient with the Forum's inability to develop transportable model programs. From a political standpoint, the county office was in the uncomfortable position of constantly explaining why all resources were concentrated on the CSD, and other constituents received no benefits from the partnership grant. Educationally, a new understanding of how to achieve reform was entering the literature. The new view argued that transporting model programs, school by school (the oretailo strategy), was too slow an approach to fundamental reform. Instead, according to that perspective, reform was best accomplished by a owholesaleo strategy that concentrated on changing policies and practices at the district (and state) levels in order to build local school capacity for reform.
The tensions that lay beneath the surface were not well-addressed by the MFP's policymaking group, the Forum. Probably because of all the stresses, the executive director retired. The appointment of his replacement led to changes in the approach of the Forum.
The new executive director came to the Forum with a background in, and deep commitments to, educational reform that would enhance the employability of young people. Because she was well-connected to the national academic and political communities that were debating how to revive American competitiveness, she was an enthusiastic proponent of osystemico change in state and district policies and practices that would restructure teaching and learning in the schools. Curriculum and instruction should, she believed, increase students' problem solving and communication abilities. School programs also should, in her eyes, involve high technology so that students will be ready for the workplace of the future. Consequently, the Forum stopped its own perceived drift and focused its attention on the school-to-work programs.
The increased focus on school-to-work issues was accompanied by other changes in Forum-sponsored activities as well. First, it increased attention to school district policies and practices. As a result of the change, for example, the Forum supported the development of vocational education competencies for the CSD that were designed in conjunction with the outcomes-based education approach.
Second, both the focus on technology and the newly adopted wholesale strategy led to the greater involvement of county school districts. Two became the site of model programs, one involved developing a high technology school of the future. The involvement of county schools addressed an internal political issue as well by ensuring that a constituent group that had felt ignored by the MFP now had reason to support it.
According to the executive director, the county school was chosen to be the site of the high technology school because the school board and the superintendent were committed to the effort. The Forum provided support only for planning, and the district was to seek additionally soft money and reallocate hard money to support its full development and institutionalization. The executive director, members of the school-to-work subcommittee, and Forum members believed that the CSD was unable to make a similar commitment. Further, they said, community support for high technology was greater in the county than in the city. Their efforts (described below) to change community attitudes in the city were an appropriate way of building support for the development of similar opportunities for city children. Although it is true that CSD staff were satisfied with the support they received and raised no questions about the high technology school in the county, it is true also that the Forum did not support the same challenging opportunities for poor, ethnic minority children as it did for their wealthier, primarily white, counterparts in the county.
The third change in MFP activities involved an active effort to change community attitudes toward the schools. The executive director and other active members of the Forum believed that parents and others, particularly in the city, were content with their schools. But, from the perspective of those concerned with economic competitiveness, the schools were failing to prepare youth for the workplace of the future. If fundamental educational reform were to occur, they argued, the community must become aware of the necessity for such changes. This line of reasoning led the Forum to be the major sponsor of a series of public meetings about education. The Forum arranged for outside, provocative speakers, and worked closely with the local newspaper and other media outlets. As a result, the community meetings gained much attention, and, according to those involved, increased support for the needed changes in schools. This, too, was part of the wholesale strategy toward school reform. Each year, to keep attention and interest on school reform, the Forum works with the newspaper to provide follow-up information to the community. For two years, the follow-up stories highlighted the innovations sponsored by the Forum.
The new Forum did not stop the successful activities. In fact, it assisted the remote university to develop a second PDS in the high school in which the Forum had been unsuccessful. The university made some progress in the school. The Forum also continued support for the career education, preschool, and parent activities at the elementary school. The health and human services subcommittee became an arena for discussion and problem solving around concerns that the integrated services program at the elementary school was underused, indicating continuing commitment to that initiative. And, in an effort to develop academies, the school-to-work transition subcommittee began working with a second high school to develop internships and mentoring programs. The work with the second high school was facilitated by the presence of the former assistant principal of the first high school.
The MFP was successful in some ways from the start. However, numerous problems existed beneath the surface success. The first executive director had a facilitative leadership style, and his efforts to find areas of consensus meant that many problems were not addressed and that frustration continued. He focused a great deal on ensuring that the three concerns that brought the partners together were equally represented in Forum programs. Consequently, no one was fully satisfied. The health and human services subcommittee was, as one participant put it, ofirst out of the block,o due to the integrated services grant. But the education and school-to-work subcommittees had both successes and failures, and the failures centered on activities of greatest concern to powerful members of the Forum.
The second executive director was most concerned about a single area, the transition from school-to-work and the reform of education so that the local economy could be competitive in the world market. Although she did not ignore the other areas, most of her attention and new activities of the Forum were devoted to preparing education to respond to the new workplace. This involved a large community education component, as well as the development of model technology-based programs and school district policies that support fundamental change.
The revitalization of the Forum following the appointment of the new executive director was clear. Equally clear was that less attention was devoted to CSD schools, and the activities the Forum supported in the county had the potential for increasing the economic gap between the city and the county.
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[Multifocus Partnership Part C]
This page was last updated January 8, 2002 (jca)