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.

Structural effort to support collaboration and partnership in district level

I read an article addressed on the attempt and practice of school leaders and district leaders to reform the structure and how the experimental result reflected on those attempts and actions. It mentioned how contemporary leading educational scholars trying to reverse the power structure of school, family and community collaboration to make individuals and family themselves serve effectively in partnership education. Although they do not confront and traditional institutional structure of schools, they hope the system in a district level has the ability to help and serve them once the leadership or the power structure is not functioning. 

In the recent centuries the school turned to be the place with multiple disciplines and rules, especially in the area like Baltimore city where majority people believe schooling needs to be more strict. And the power classification between school, teacher and students, families are like hierarchy in military or government bureaucracy. However, while military product national defense and the bureaucratic system product civic production, the school's production, which is learning, cannot be evaluated and controlled like national defense material or GDP numbers. On the one hand, learning is self-reflected in a way that the educational outcome of students could be really independent from standard measurement. On the other hand, a strict power hierarchy system may limit the development of student by assigning them a specific role played in school. That is why Sander raised the question about the reform of school power hierarchy.

A new power hierarchy in school should base on the fact that school is not making students predictable and formatted. Such a transition is not only to increase priority onto the need of clients—students and families in the system. Also it required developing the capacity and connection of students and family in the process of educational implication. Although Sander's article has some general description, I am still wondering the specific operation they took and the organizational strategy specifically during that period of gap during the retreat of school power. 

Reference

Sanders, M. (2013). Collaborating for Change: How an Urban School District and a Community-Based Organization Support and Sustain School, Family, and Community Partnerships, 1693-1712.