Radical University-District Partnerships

This inspirational book provides a concrete model of why university-district partnerships are essential to preparing justice-focused school leaders, and how these partnerships can thrive. Readers will find details of one such partnership, Leadership Education for Anaheim Districts (LEAD), which incorporated high-impact practices for equity, self-knowledge, and system change. Using the LEAD partnership as an example, this accessible text provides supports for launching a similar radical partnership, including converging goals, a student-centered theory of action, and key resources. It offers guidance for sustaining a radical partnership through the inevitable questions and conflicts that will arise, including coteaching of all content by university and district partners, and the mutual respect needed for successful joint work. The text includes core pieces of LEAD’s leadership preparation curriculum and instruction that encourage new forms of leaders and leadership, including strategic inquiry, multilingual-learner shadowing, and one-on-one coaching and mentoring. Radical University-District Partnerships is a call for universities and school districts to work together toward preparing educational leaders who will bring greater justice for all children.

Book Features:

• A focus on preparing principals to lead schools in ways that change outcomes for historically underserved students (K–12).
• A framework for radical partnerships that is horizontal, authentic, and engaged in justice.
• Chapters coauthored by a team of university faculty, district administrators, and program graduates.
• Voices of program graduates who share their experiences in LEAD and how it impacted their leadership learning.
• A look forward to next steps for practicing and theorizing, including ways to adjust LEAD programming based on the editors’ research findings and successful expansion to a second school district.

Jennifer Goldstein is director of Leadership Education for Anaheim Districts (LEAD) and a professor at the College of Education, California State University Fullerton. Nell Scharff Panero is an associate professor at Hunter College, City University of New York. Maritza Lozano is an assistant professor at the College of Education, California State University Fullerton.

“Readers will find an inspiring and immensely useful guide, not only for understanding what makes partnerships important and how to collaboratively build, fund, grow, and sustain them, but also to see what differentiates an effective partnership from a radical partnership. The distinction is an important one. In radical partnerships, the partnership is both a mindset and a practice. Partnership isn’t something that is merely structural, it is a way of thinking and proceeding.”
—From the Foreword by Michelle Young, dean and professor, Berkeley School of Education, executive director emeritus, University Council for Educational Administration

“This insightful book vividly illustrates how a university and school district can partner to prepare educational leaders who are committed to meeting students’ needs and, equally important, who understand how to change systems to do so. We see such leaders emerge in the story told here. The authors demonstrate that it is not only possible to overcome the historic challenges to university-district partnerships, but that doing so is a crucial part of achieving educational equity and justice.”
—Linda Darling-Hammond, president, Learning Policy Institute and professor emeritus, Stanford University

“An insightful analysis of how to build and sustain partnerships between universities and school districts that truly make a difference. Such partnerships should be commonplace but, unfortunately, they are not. This book makes clear how both universities and school districts can benefit from working together, yielding tangible benefits for communities and kids as well.”
—Pedro A. Noguera, Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California

“In a time when principal turnover confounds districts and destabilizes school cultures, the authors offer a humanistic, praxis-driven vision of what it could look like to build future educational leaders around the needs and hopes of learners at the margins. A must-read for anyone interested in transforming educational leadership for the next generation!”
—Shane Safir, former founding principal, June Jordan School for Equity

“Across the education landscape today, there is great interest in building partnerships that span school districts and universities. Many practitioners and scholars are confident that these partnerships can improve the field's engagement in practices like leadership development. However, few resources show us how to use partnerships to improve practice. This book does just that for our understanding of equity and justice-centered leadership preparation.”
—Louis Gomez, professor, UCLA and senior fellow, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Contents

Foreword Michelle Young  vii

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction  xiii

Part I: Partner Voices  1
Jennifer Goldstein

1.  Radical Partnership: A Conceptual Framework  5
Jennifer Goldstein and Michael Matsuda

2.  Building a Radical Partnership: The Leadership Education for Anaheim Districts Case  15
Jennifer Goldstein, Nell Scharff Panero, Maritza Lozano, and Manuel Colón

3.  Sustaining a Radical Partnership: Evolving the Partnership Through Implementation  39
Jennifer Goldstein, Nell Scharff Panero, Maritza Lozano, and Manuel Colón

4.  Leadership Preparation That Centers Emotional Intelligence: Self-Reflection and Individual Coaching  47
Jennifer Goldstein and Maritza Lozano

5.  Leadership Preparation That Centers Equity and Justice: Focusing on Students Through Strategic Inquiry and Shadowing Multilingual Learners  67
Nell Scharff Panero, Jennifer Goldstein, and Maritza Lozano

Part II: Graduate Voices  81
Maritza Lozano

6. “Those Kids”: Shifting the Conversation With Colleagues  85
Diana Amaro Fujimoto

7. “Ser Como Soy”: Leading with Compassion, Empathy, and Love  97
Claudia Ruiz-Flores with Maritza Lozano

8. Stepping Out of the Shadows  107
Amanda Bryant

9. “No one has ever taught me that before, Mr. Lee”: Using Strategic Inquiry to Meet the Needs of Multilingual Learners With Writing Instruction  121
Andy Lee

10.  Oral Language Development Across the Curriculum: Supporting Multilingual Learners in the Arts  137
Brian Belski

11:  Finding My Voice by Helping Students Find Theirs: Centering the Expertise of a Teacher of Students With Disabilities  153
Christina Maguire

Part III: The Chorus  165
Jennifer Goldstein

12.  Leadership Preparation That Centers Systems Change  167
Jennifer Goldstein and Manuel Colón with Jaron Fried, Brad Jackson, Maritza Lozano, Aida Molina, and Estela Zarate

Conclusion: Lessons Unlearned  191
Jennifer Goldstein, Maritza Lozano, and Nell Scharff Panero

Notes  195

References  199

Index  209

About the Editors and Contributors  215

Download the Appendix in PDF format