4 Keys to Successful High School and University Partnerships
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” - Helen Keller
Recently USC announced that the university will award a full, all-expenses-paid scholarship to a student at each and every one of our Ednovate high schools on an annual basis!
Something like this doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took over 7 years of collaboration and partnership for us to create this scholarship with the university, and its impact will be life-changing for Ednovate alumni.
I’ve been fortunate in my career to have established two successful high school-university partnerships. In 2008 we were able to create UIC College Prep, a high school partnership with the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago. UIC College Prep continues to be one of the highest-performing high schools in all of Chicago.
Ednovate has been partnering with the University of Southern California from day one. And the university supports all of our schools--USC Hybrid High is amongst the top-ranked in the Los Angeles area. And our brother and sister schools--East, Legacy, Brio and Esperanza--are right up there, too!
Many times I hear people tell me that universities are tough to partner with, that they move too slowly, and there is too much red tape. But that hasn’t been the case on my end.
From my experience, these are the 4 keys to establishing a great university-high school partnership:
1. Aligned Leadership
With both of the universities I’ve worked with, it was critical to have a strong working relationship among leadership. Specifically, that involved the university’s Provost and the Dean of the college you’re working with being closely connected to the CEO/Superintendent and Principal at the school. There are many times that our great teachers or faculty want to create programs, and they frequently get stuck on red tape. Many times the leadership can help to cut them loose from the red tape so partnerships can happen, greatly benefiting students.
2. Play to each other’s strengths
This goes to the old adage of “Know what you know and know what you don’t know.” Universities are great at a lot of things, including research and branding. High schools are great practitioners of teaching and learning and the operational aspects of running a school system. I believe our university partnerships have been successful because the universities acknowledged early on that they “are not in the business of running high schools” and high schools don’t have the capacity to conduct rigorous research. What made both partnerships successful was that the university stayed on the side of research, sharing and conducting, and the high schools stayed on the side of practice, choosing curriculum, budget decisions and choosing teaching focus areas. Having this clear line made decision-making much easier.
3. Create Win-Win-Wins.
Our students and parents want to go to a quality school that is backed by research. Our teachers and staff want to make sure we are preparing our students for the rigors of college with a clear and immediate feedback loop to answer that critical readiness question. Our university partners want to help students of color and students from low-income households, and welcome them to their freshman class. And they want their student teachers to be trained in high quality schools. Families WIN. School WINs. University WINs.
4. Formalize everything for a long-lasting partnership
What has made both UIC College Prep and Ednovate schools successful for many years is that we documented each of our strengths and win-win-wins in an memorandum-of-understanding (MOU) that we revisit every 5 years. This is very useful in tracking and recording the successes, which is helpful when there are leadership changes or next stages in the partnerships. Typical components of an MOU include 1) the spirit and goals of the partnership, 2) the decision-making roles, 3) a time horizon for the MOU, 4) necessary legal language, and 5) signatures from the aligned leadership.
We would love to help if you are considering partnering with a high school or university. Also, if you already have a partnership like ours, please share (in the comments section below) what makes your partnership great! And thank you for the work you do on behalf of your students and community.