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Q: How do partners hold one another accountable?
WEINBERG: That’s going to be dependent on the formation of each different partnership and what people want from it. There are tons of partnerships that schools have where the outside organization has a grant and so they have their focus on making sure they fulfill the terms of their grant, no matter what the school needs or wants. And so they’ll hold the school accountable for making sure they get the information they need to meet their funder’s criteria. We’ll participate or not participate based on whether we feel that the grant is good for the school.
In other instances, like in our working relationship with New Visions, because we both know we’re going to be here for a long time and working together, we tend to be more open in terms of a dialogue about what’s working and what’s not working and how we can work well together. The interesting thing about this partnership the city’s created, these new kinds of working relationships, is that in the end, at least from my work with New Visions, they seem to have very little invested in being right and more invested in making sure they’re serving us. I think they’re trying to provide ideas that will better serve schools, but like a good teacher, they want us to grasp those ideas ourselves and to name them as our own, rather than having to lecture and say, “Now I want you to know this and do this.” And it’s been an interesting approach.
They’ve been the most successful partnership I feel like we’ve had. Partly because their investment is in seeing us do well. They’re not fulfilling the terms of some grantor.
Q: Has partnership changed the way you look for staff? Do you look for people with a particular set of skills who can work with outside organizations?
WEINBERG: No. The [liaison to the] outside organization is going to be me and the administrative staff, for the most part. If the outside organizations have things to offer, we find staff for them to work with and then go forward. The business of running schools is not dealing with kids, for the most part. No matter how successful or interesting it is, it’s an ancillary part of education.
Q: I understand the district set up this arrangement, where you get to choose the organization you wanted to work with. Do they provide additional support, either linking you with a partner or working through some issues if you might have some?
WEINBERG: They probably would provide support with issues if you had some. It’s interesting, because the Department of Ed plays two roles here. It is one of the support organizations, too. So they’re a little bit schizophrenic.
As with many things with the Department of Ed these days, there was a business model that they were following. Somebody with an MBA had the idea. They never quite thought through what their role was. We’re in the third year of this now. The first time through, it happened too fast. The information was available in print and you could go to a meet-and-greet fair, sort of a “speed dating” kind of thing to get to know people. Much like other organizations, I think what’s happened since then is people talk. Word of mouth has been a much more valuable tool in terms of discerning how things work, whom you might work well with, and the negotiating the partnership stuff happens in a less formal way, because the Department of Ed has tried to decentralize this part of its work.
There’s the ability to move, which is one of the ways the department facilitates the process. But I can’t speak well to this because I haven’t had a problem. We’ve worked very nicely with our partner.
Just from being a principal for quite some time now, I’ve seen the many iterations of the Department of Ed over the last nine or ten years. This is functioning nicely for our school and for us, partly because I had the experience of having a boss and knowing what would have been expected of me, and partly because what this group does is very smart and thoughtful and helpful.
