A BluePrint for Success: Case Studies of Successful - Educational ...

A Blueprint for Success
Third, when an organization is small, a lot depends on collaboration and partnerships. Many
programs are too small to effectively impact students on their own, but knowing everybody
in this area who is doing this work and having them know you, enables an organization to
achieve more on behalf of the students and families. For The Partners Program, this means
being able to help students find resources outside of Partners, matching students with the
services they need that Partners doesn’t yet provide, and even starting new collaborative
programs from scratch, as in the collaborative partnership with the University of California
at Berkeley’s extension program.
The final tip is an extension of the point about collaboration, but specific to public/private partnerships
in education. For external programs that do not work closely with the public schools in which
their students are based, Director Fanning commented that, “it’s hard to serve kids well if you don’t
know what is going on with them daily in school.” For this reason, The Partners Program has formal
relationships with the schools in which their middle-schoolers are based. They “want all teaching
teams to know us and we want to know them.” The Partners Program is building formal processes
with their two partner middle schools to talk about students and their struggles and to share data.
Director Fanning stressed the importance of “getting along” with districts that do not have funding
to assist with data collection, adding that a “critical mass of programs and kids” and finding financial
support for data collection can help persuade the district to commit to collaborative data efforts.
As for one opportunity to do something differently, Director Fanning noted that he wished he knew
“where all of our alumni are in order to better understand their (and our) outcomes and how we can
better support our students as they progress through high school and college – especially those who
are struggling or have dropped out.” For this reason, the program is actively attempting to remain in
contact with all current students to maximize the likelihood that alumni will respond to the surveys
and update their information long after they have completed the program. Also, by adding program
components for alumni while they are in high school and eventually college, the program will be in a
better position to know how students are doing and to assist them in their journeys.
Educational Policy Institute 103 www.educationalpolicy.org