University-Partnered New School Designs: Fertile Ground for Research–Practice Partnerships

Across the nation, more than 8,000 new schools have been created this century in an effort to broaden educational opportunity (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2016). New school developers come from every sector of society, from venture capitalists to grassroots community organizations, from educators to university researchers. New school development policies, from charter school laws to local autonomy initiatives, are intersecting with a larger civic responsibility movement in higher education to produce a new generation of university-partnered K–12 schools (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007). Unlike the laboratory schools of previous generations, these public schools are designed to disrupt persistent patterns of inequity and prepare low-income students of color to flourish in college. As they do so, these new schools are poised to take on our field’s long-standing struggle to better marry research and practice (National Research Council, 2012) by providing a unique and fertile context for research–practice partnerships (RPPs).

RPPs are defined as “long-term collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving schools and districts” (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013, p. 48). In their recent call for more research on RPPs, Coburn and Penuel (2016) portrayed the field as diverse, including different types of partners and a wide variety of problems of practice. They identified prominent RPPs, such as the Chicago Consortium for Chicago School Research and the Strategic Education Research Partnership, but noted that RPPs of all types are proliferating—fueled by new funding streams as well as “researchers’ and practitioners’ desire to find new models of research that make a difference in public schools in more tangible ways” (Coburn & Penuel, 2016, p. 49). Absent from their review, however, is any mention of university-partnered single-school RPPs within a new school policy context. We think this is an oversight, perhaps based on the perception that university-partnered schools are exceptional and unscalable. To the contrary, we argue that these schools provide a promising context for marrying research and practice to bring about fundamental change in schools, with potential for spread of innovation to districts and universities.

We represent four of the University of California (UC) research campuses—partnered with districts and linked through a UC Network of College-Going Schools—that have developed six new schools as a form of community-engaged public scholarship (see Table 1). We are part of a growing movement to build a K–20 pipeline to prepare first-generation college-going students to enter and succeed in our university systems. University-run or partnered schools have a long history reaching back to colonial times—when colleges such as Harvard, Rutgers, and Yale operated Latin schools to prepare students for their corridors—and later to the Progressive Era, which established laboratory schools, including Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (Cucchiara, 2010). Today’s university-partnered schools are notable for their commitment to serving students traditionally marginalized in higher education—in sharp contrast to the affluent students of faculty and elites served in prior generations. As a relatively new movement, it is challenging to capture the number of K–12 schools that have been designed and sustained based on deep, mutualistic university partnerships, but there are exemplars and their numbers appear to be growing.

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Table 1

UC Network of College-Going Schools

School	UC Campus	Year Opened	No. of students	Grade Levels	Policy Context
Preuss School	San Diego	1999	846	6–12	UC San Diego charter, San Diego City Schools
CAL Prep	Berkeley	2005	420	6–12	Aspire Public Schools charter, early college model
Gompers Preparatory Academy	San Diego	2005	1,143	6–12	Charter, San Diego City Schools
West Sacramento Prep	Davis	2007	95	6–12	Charter: UC Davis, Washington USD, Los Rios CC
UCLA Community School	Los Angeles	2009	1,000	K–12	Pilot School, Los Angeles USD (LAUSD)
Horace Mann UCLA Community School	Los Angeles	2017 projected	TBD	K–12	Locally initiated school, LAUSD autonomous school model

Note. UC = University of California; USD = Unified School District; CC = Community College.

As stable sites for teaching, research, and service, our schools resemble the agricultural field stations created by land grant universities a century ago to solve the pressing problem of growing food (Mehan, Kaufman, Lytle, Quartz, & Weinstein, 2010). As educational field stations, our schools have been designed to remedy the problem that our 10-campus public university does not represent all the students in our state. To do this, our RPPs explicitly address issues of race, class, and equity. As Barton and Bevan (2016) argued, RPPs that aim to reduce inequality must have “mechanisms for recognizing systemic racism.” Our schools were designed to include intentional mechanisms for disrupting deficit conceptions of low-income students of color and taking on the structures and institutional practices that restrict access to higher education both in K–12 schooling and within universities (Mehan, 2012; Weinstein & Worrell, 2016).

To Coburn and Penuel’s (2016) call for more research, including comparative studies, on how RPPs work and the outcomes they generate, we suggest that the new school designs provide a fertile but decidedly different context for RPPs. These RPPs are necessarily multidimensional and multilevel problem-solving ecologies. New schools must create, sustain, and improve a myriad of interrelated structures and educational practices, with a complex accountability for whole cohorts of students. In this way, new school designs are not the type of intervention spaces described by Coburn and Penuel, in which researchers and practitioners assess needs and implement evidence-based models to address single problems. Instead, the dynamics of new school organizations committed to democratic participation require researchers and practitioners to bring their knowledge to the table and together “build the plane while flying”—as opposed to replicating an existing model or implementing a set of best practices. In this way, the roles of researchers and practitioners in these new school design contexts are shaped by an earlier conception of school reform as a collective struggle to become better, solve problems, and advance the project of public education (Dewey, 1916; Lindbloom, 1990; Oakes, Quartz, Ryan, & Lipton, 2000).

But these differences in scope or process do not diminish the importance of systematically studying the quality of our work in these schools. As researchers, we are members of multiple and overlapping professional communities. We participate in teacher work groups, school governing boards, district advisory panels, and university dissertation committees. Wearing many hats, we frame the multiple RPPs at our single sites in terms of three related aims: informing practice, ensuring accountability, and creating generalizable knowledge. That our six schools are embedded within markedly different ecological contexts—of history, institutional arrangements (on or off university campuses and partnered with charter or traditional districts), locale, population and design—enables comparison in strategies and outcomes and strengthens generalizability of new learning.

Consider the efforts of researchers and practitioners at CAL Prep, a UC Berkeley and Aspire Public Schools partnership, who carefully track student experience and achievement, and collaboratively work to create and put in place systems of learning supports to ensure college for all. Their RPP created an aligned and responsive pathway toward college readiness by programming for requirements within classrooms as a package deal and by rethinking staffing, schedules, and structures to address student needs. Examples include investing in a dean of students for early intervention, teaching for rigor and support, advisories, an eighth period (for homework, tutoring, and enrichment), Saturday School, schedules that allow course repeats, and an extended day/year. They also created an inquiry-based chemistry curriculum with explicit supports for struggling students to improve pass rates in this key gateway course. Each of these strategies was developed through careful and systematic study of the conditions that allowed all students to meet high academic standards, yet the roles partners played were varied and changed in response to the needs of a start-up developing school. In this case, the RPP clearly informed practice; it also helped the school achieve a high college-going rate, thereby ensuring accountability to its community and district (Weinstein & Worrell, 2016).

To address the widespread problem of retaining good teachers, the UCLA Community School was intentionally designed as a teacher-led school in the first wave of pilot schools in Los Angeles in 2007. Partnering with the university to support teacher leadership and the local development of programs and practices set in motion an RPP to understand how to create democratic and sustainable workplace cultures. This RPP builds on a growing body of research (e.g., Simon & Johnson, 2015) that is challenging the perception that teachers leave urban schools because the students are too hard to teach or face intractable barriers to learning. This research argues that teachers leave because the institutional arrangements and norms preclude them from doing their best work and flourishing as educators. In order to develop retention-oriented institutional arrangements and norms, researchers and practitioners have created surveys to study workplace culture, developed an alternative teacher evaluation system that foregrounds learning, supported team-based year-long improvement cycles, participated on governance committees to determine funding priorities, and created summer research and development fellowships to support program development and professional growth. These RPP activities have clearly informed practice; they have also led to a higher-than-average retention rate—one of the school’s key accountability outcomes.

To address the issue of generalizability, UCLA Community School is a residency site or “teaching school” for the UC Los Angeles Teacher Education Program. Each year, about a third of the teachers serve as mentors, helping novice teachers understand the nature and promise of teacher leadership within a strong and supportive workplace culture. This is one way in which our schools are poised to create their own structures for uptake and spread. To achieve even broader impact, UC San Diego has leveraged its deep and intensive engagement at two partnership schools (Mehan, 2012) to improve the school lives of many students regionally through the CREATE STEM Success Initiative (CSSI). This collective effort links faculty, staff, and students with the San Diego education community to support K–20 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in the region. The CSSI supports researchers to work with campus and community partners to design outreach and education projects that leverage university resources to help plug “leaks” in the regional pipeline to STEM skills, degrees, and jobs. This partnership with district leaders helps push structural and sustainable changes districtwide in ways not possible in work with single schools alone.

Ensuring accountability in highly politicized environments requires strategic alliances and, in some cases, community organizing (Martinez & Quartz, 2012). A central theme of our work has been the need to protect the freedom to design a school and engage in public scholarship amid the inevitable politics of districts and universities that constrain such design freedom in typical schools. In the face of such politics, for example, the UC Davis partnership has had to fight against becoming like any other school (that is, regressing to the mean) while balancing the need to make accommodations to stay both “alive” and financially solvent. Local political contexts are rarely static, so adaptability and flexibility are key to perceiving the school as a value-added asset to the community. Whatever other aspirations the university may have for its school, managing—or at least tracking—local community politics must come first.

Despite the challenges, we have all experienced the process of creating and sustaining new schools to be deeply rewarding and professionally enriching. New school designs in partnership with universities are fertile ground for RPPs as well as the field of education research more broadly. As problem-solving ecologies in which research informs practice, ensures accountability, and creates generalizable knowledge, these schools suggest an alternative gold standard to the large-scale research consortia RPP. University-partnered schools provide rare opportunities for researchers to live inside schools as full members of a community of practice committed to equity and excellence. They also make real the promise of public scholarship by deepening faculty and graduate student research, engaging undergraduates in education, and shaping change at the university and in the district—providing a distinct and tangible contribution within the expanding policy landscape of new school options.