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Q&A WITH CEO DEREK MITCHELL
1.What enticed you to PartnersSI at this point
in your career?
I came to PartnersSI because the organization has
proven itself successful with a critical component of district-wide
reform that continues to challenge even the most effective organizations.
That is, PartnersSI knows how to help regular teachers develop
their competencies, skills and knowledge to achieve extraordinary
results for kids. Other organizations focus on the important task
of bringing in new talent to urban public schools. We, however,
are successfully building the competencies of the very teachers
who are already in the system. The future of so many of our precious
ones are currently entrusted to these teachers; therefore PartnersSI
plays a vital role in supporting them to be more adaptive and
responsive to children's learning needs and significantly improve
student achievement.
2. What results lead you to believe PartnersSI
is ready to make a broader impact?
There are three facts that suggest now is the right
time for growth and expansion.
First, we've demonstrated success in supporting
teachers to meet the learning needs of poor students of color
and English Learners. In fact, our results outpace those of other
reforms in CA. Over the course of three years, the average PartnersSI
school (serving a high concentration of children in need) makes
a 14 percentage point gain on the California Standards Test, compared
to 7 percentage points in other schools making gains in the state.
Second, our success has been fairly consistent.
For three years in a row, 70% or more PartnersSI schools have
outperformed similar schools on the Academic Performance Index.
Third, and most compelling of all, we found that
PartnersSI schools that implemented our work most effectively
also produced the most impressive results. For instance, from
2007 to 2008, eight partner schools in San Jose Unified School
District increased the percentage of proficient students on the
California Standards Test in English Language Arts by 8 percentage
points. This was triple the average district and state gain, and
almost twice the average gain in our similar-schools comparison
group. Combined, these results suggest that our approach is more
powerful, more consistent and more effective than most other reforms
with large populations of students of color and English Learners.
The fact that we work with and through our schools' current teachers
and staff, building their capacity, supporting their growth, and
investing in their successes is an important distinction in our
work, and perhaps the most promising factor of all when considering
the issue of scaling our efforts.
3. How will your particular areas of expertise,
leadership style and background impact the way the organization
operates and grows?
Over the last 15 years, my work centered on information
and accountability systems design and development. My personal
interest and the service to which I put my training is educational
equity. In all the systems I've developed over the years, the
intent has been to inform and empower right-minded people with
both the data and the means of communicating results so that they
can make transparent the inherent inequities in the educational
system, and thus more effectively address them. PartnersSI works
at the classroom, grade level and school leadership levels to
do this very thing.
My early responsibility to PartnersSI will be to
build our muscles for internal performance management and evaluation
so that we can be crystal clear about why we are making an impact
and what the relationships are between our inputs and outcomes
in schools. This improved line of sight, between our implementers
and the results enjoyed by our schools will provide the basis
upon which we will inform and impact the field.
4. What are your strategic priorities for the
organization over the next year and why?
Our Board has set a very ambitious vision for the
organization, one of partnering in more contexts and establishing
national influence by 2015. That vision will drive a series of
core organizational strategies over the next 18 months. First,
we need to become an organization that is even more coherent in
the "science" of our approach, and more transparent about exactly
how we get results from implementing specific strategies. Second,
we have to refine our service model in such a way that strips
away the components that are not vital to achieving the results
we seek. This will make our work more credible, replicable and
sustainable. And third, we need to acquire the financial capital
for expansion by developing a growth capital campaign.
5. In today's education policy and economic climate,
what challenges and opportunities do you foresee for the organization?
As with most large urban districts, our district
partners will struggle with severe budget challenges over the
next few years. What generally happens in times of financial crisis
is that the reforms aimed at implementing equity strategies are
the first to be cut. This challenge cannot be underestimated for
us or the field at large. However, we're lucky to be partnering
with districts who share in our mission to better meet the needs
of children of color living in poverty. Our partner districts
are standing against internal and external forces that are essentially
saying: "better performance on the part of these kids is not something
we can afford right now." District leaders are pushing back, holding
to the moral imperative that they sustain equity-based reform
strategies. We see it as our duty to give them the information
they need in order to demonstrate that their investments are being
highly leveraged.
PartnersSI also has a unique opportunity to contribute
to other organizations that are tackling this problem from different
directions. We've had considerable conversations and learning
partnerships with organizations like New Leaders for New Schools
and Teach For America. If we're smart and are able to combine
our approaches to cultivate new leadership, new vibrant teacher
leadership and new core strategies and systems for teachers to
be more data-driven, child-focused and adaptive, then we'd be
able to accomplish some economies of scale and steepen the slope
of success toward all three organizations' objectives. Forging
strategic partnerships is an explicit expectation that the Board
and I have for our work of achieving national influence.
6. What makes PartnersSI unique from other education
reform organizations? How would you harness the organization's
strengths to fulfill the vision for strategic growth?
It's not by accident that we're named 'Partners'
in School Innovation. We are collaborators with districts and
schools in the design, development and implementation of our efforts.
We invest heavily in building the relationships that allow us
access to a leaders' growth and a school's performance culture.
This partnering rather than consulting is in and
of itself an acceleration strategy, and a strategy for sustaining
the work over time. By the end of a partnership, we aim for the
work to be wholly owned within the district's and school's infrastructures,
and better sustained over the long haul, even through leadership
transitions and shifts in strategic direction. We intend to reinforce
this aspect of partnership even as we develop new, more economical
delivery models for spreading our innovation.
There are a couple more distinguishing features.
One is the primacy of the work that happens between teachers and
children in the classroom. That is partially why we've been so
successful helping teachers achieve the gains that they have.
So we must continue to reinforce this primary mechanism through
various service delivery models in our future work.
Finally, we do not primarily drive our work through
content knowledge because we see our teachers as the professionals
of their content and craft. Instead, we provide change-agency,
effective structures and proven tools that shore up teachers'
skills so they can continue to grow as professionals and adapt
their instruction to children's needs. Through PartnersSI's support,
teachers use new mechanisms to better utilize their content expertise
and hone their craft. They then see the results of new ways of
working and that success reconnects them to the power and agency
they have as educators to better the lives of their students.
Articles in this issue (Summer 2009):
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