The Role of District

The community or district background of a school brings certain uniqueness to that school including student background, environment and even teachers' training. All issues we faced within a school cannot be isolated from its community. Then it comes to partnership reform. How to make the partnership program work more smoothly from a region's perspective. Auerbach believes that the production and practice of reformed policies should seek to balanced content, structure, and flexibility to promote greater reform sustainability.

A couple of two things in his article that mainly illustrated me are the attention to interaction among leaders and the flexibility of the reform, and these two things are highly related to each other. To keep the sustained interaction between leaders who are not hierarchical but collaborative and dialectical, we have to consider questions of reform flexibility. As we heard from NNPS, the local reform of partnership education does not have any power over school, family and district. After finding these districts that would like to cooperate with reform, we still need to pay attention to the flexibility. If reforms are too flexible, they may miss the base of further reform and diminish their potential to promote positive change. I read about how NNPS dwells between these two extremes by only setting up the theoretical and framework environment for real reform leaders in professional practice rather than prescribed activities with little room to accommodate differences in contexts. 

The reading also mentioned that as supporting the local leaders, reform developers and reform leaders should also consider how to cultivate the different dimensions of leadership that affect the implementation and sustainability of externally developed reforms. For example, district size, culture, and resources should be challenging the expertise of professions who support the reform and thus it should be considered in the dialogue about changing district priorities. To help with that, investigation with vivid aim could target at reform characteristics and dimensions of district leadership.

Reference

Auerbach, S. (2012). School leadership for authentic family and community partnerships: research perspectives for transforming practice. London: Routledge.