Navigating disparate goals in the school–university partnership: reflections from two PDS liaisons relaunching partnerships Open Access

What facilitates partnership in a professional development school (PDS) relationship? People – stakeholders such as a faculty liaison, administrators, teachers, personnel from both institutions – facilitate the process of partnership. Partnership is a verb and not simply a noun. For a partnership to work, the people involved must act together, though these actions are often complexly negotiated as various stakeholders approach the work with varying perspectives (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001). Still, the designation of “partnership” implies a collaboration, a “doing” together. In the case of a PDS partnership, the “doing” involves enacting the 9 PDS Essentials (National Association of Professional Development Schools, 2021) through communication at multiple levels – from emails, to meetings, to informal conversations and working together on initiatives and events. In this article, we focus on Essential l: Comprehensive Mission, Essential 2: Clinical Preparation, Essential 3: Professional Learning and Leading, and Essential 6: Articulated Agreements, as we reflect on our processes for facilitating progress and accomplishing partnership goals between a small, private university and a local P-12 school system. These partnership goals involve support of and professional development for the P-12 teachers and schools, along with support for the preparation of new teachers, and ultimately academic support for all the P-12 students with whom teachers and preservice teachers work.

We, the authors, have served as liaisons between North Star University (pseudonym) and schools in a local P-12 school district. MC-F was a liaison to three K-5 elementary schools in the district for seven years and JPS was the liaison to the middle school for six years. In total, the school district contains 7 schools and almost 4,000 students. The district’s minority enrollment is 50% with 39% Hispanic students. Approximately 24% of students in the district are economically disadvantaged (U.S. News & World Report). In 2022, North Star University was designated a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) with 28% Hispanic students enrolled.

As background, our PDS sites were part of a consortium of schools that had partnership agreements with North Star University, but both of our sites needed relaunching when we began our work. By relaunching, we mean that there had not been a liaison there for several months (in JPS case) or years (in MC-F’s case) and so the faculty and staff needed a refresher on the possibilities of PDS. On the university side, as new PDS liaisons, we were also learning in real time, on the ground, the logistics of facilitating these partnerships. We both, separately, held needs assessment meetings with any administrator or teacher who would join us. Because these were before or after school hours and there was no additional compensation for attending, sometimes only a handful of school faculty showed up. However, little by little, through liaison presence in the building and informal conversations, emails and surveys, small initiative by small initiative, like book clubs, inquiry groups and “lunch and learns”, we built momentum for the partnership. We also facilitated field observation hours for as many as twenty teacher candidates each semester, site-based teacher education courses and student teaching placements. Yet, getting all stakeholders involved to help in the preparation of new teachers while also supporting P12 students and teachers, often proved to be “one more task” and therefore, we reflected on the precarity of this model for training teachers while embracing its necessity.

In this article, we consider how we have achieved PDS-related goals in collaboration with stakeholders in our PDS partnership as we entered the role of liaison and strengthened our partnerships over the years. How have we “gotten things done” to serve P-12 students, teachers and preservice teachers? In the real-time of our hours, days and weeks, we found ourselves needing to communicate to the P-12 school stakeholders the purpose and goals of the PDS partnership – to support preservice teachers in obtaining fieldwork experience, student teachers finishing their programs, in-service teachers in professional development, administrators in their leadership, all in the service of P-12 student success. Importantly, we needed to listen to understand the goals, strengths and needs of our P-12 partners, to conduct needs assessments, and to build consensus. We found ourselves communicating constantly via email, phone and face-to-face meetings to schedule field hours and site-based courses, offer onboarding and support for interns, and work with school administrators to decide how to use allocated funds for professional development and student achievement. That is the “what” of our goals, but the “how” we have approached and reached these goals has been the complex part. This complexity stems from the day-to-day differences in priorities between the stakeholders. P-12 schools obviously center their focus on teaching P-12 students, while the university has as its priority the preparation and certification of teachers. These goals are related, of course, but they are not identical.

We offer a brief overview of teacher training in the United States to provide background for the PDS work we do as liaisons, one that, at its core, involves teacher preparation for the next generation of teachers. In the United States, the disparate goals of P-12 education and universities highlight the challenges related to teacher training which, over its history, has spanned and attempted to bridge, often unsuccessfully, these two worlds. Teaching existed well before teacher training or teacher-educators (Labaree, 2008). However, since the middle of the 19th century in the United States, teacher education has taken on an increasingly significant role in the world of teaching, often embedded in local colleges and universities. Initially, the experiential learning part of teacher education occurred at normal school, transferring more to site-based field experiences in the post–World War II era.

The process for training teachers in the United States has become more formalized over time, requiring teachers to obtain supervised fieldwork experience in classrooms before becoming certified or permitted to teach independently. The advent of the modern PDS comes out of the Holmes Group, itself a response to A Nation at Risk (1983). The Holmes Group issued three reports on teachers (1986), schools (1990) and schools of education (1995). While the first report placed teacher education squarely in the domain of the research university, the second and third reports, channeling Dewey, saw schools as important sites of post-secondary learning (Johnson, 1990). The latter two reports of the Holmes Group advocated for enhanced partnerships between colleges of education and nearby K-12 schools and school districts, which they called PDSs.

Today’s PDSs take various formats, from having one university and one P-12 school or district, to one university and many districts (as was the case at North Star University), to one P-12 school or district collaborating with several universities (Fletcher, Watkins, Gless, & Villareal-Carman, 2011). These formats depend on whether the partnership decisions are more centralized with administrators at the P-12 institution and the university, with established and codified procedures, or more logistical in nature, involving the teachers and professors to accomplish goals without as much administrative input (Castle & Reilly, 2011; Garas-York, del Prado Hill, Day, Truesdell, & Keller-Mathers, 2018).

Ideally, when P-12 schools see some of the benefits of helping to train teachers for them – such as having more of a hiring pool and offering their students more adult help in the classroom – then stakeholders’ commitments converge. When P-12 schools collaborate on research agendas to improve their students’ outcomes, clear guidelines for conducting the research from both institutions as well as shared goals, participation in the partnership is better incentivized (Hall & Freeman, 2014; Lentz, Ramirez, Pickett, Purinton, & Farley-Ripple, 2024). When P-12 schools do not feel the benefits of collaborating with the university are adequate, they can be less inclined to collaborate with universities to train new teachers. These partnerships can languish and, in some cases, fall apart completely (Breault, 2013). Similarly, as university PDS partners commit to supporting P-12 students as part of their teacher education mission, as is evidenced in CAEP requests for P-12 impact reports, then the stakeholders’ commitments align further (Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, 2022).

Contingency theory informs our conceptual framework, i.e. the understanding that there is no one best way to structure an organization or make decisions (Ayman, Chemers, & Fiedler, 1995). The structure of the partnership will depend upon the ways the multiple stakeholders communicate and plan their collaboration (Baker, 2011). This exists in tension with Weber, who argues that in a bureaucracy, there is a right “level” at which a decision can and should be made (Chowdhury, 1984). Baker (2011) adopts the framework of Mintzberg (1983, 1989) and provides a more nuanced description of what such a Weberian bureaucracy might look like in the educational setting.

The concepts framing our study include multiple stakeholder negotiations (Grossman et al., 2001) as well as multi-tiered partnerships (Baker, 2011). Baker (2011, p. 54) describes various tiers present in educational partnerships such as ours, including what he calls the “strategic apex” which on the university side is usually the Dean and on the P-12 school side is the superintendent. According to Baker, another tier of stakeholders includes the Middle Line Manager tier, which on the university side is usually the department chair and on the P-12 school side is usually the school principal. Technostructures and support structures from the university and P-12 sides can also interact with the apex and the middle line manager tiers to provide support (see Table 1). Finally, another tier includes the technical operating core, which on the university side would include the liaison and perhaps the university professors involved in the partnership, and on the P-12 school side, the teachers. In its most basic form, a school–university partnership might simply exist as a “single tier” whereby professors might “continue to work with former students who live in the geographical region of the university” (Baker, 2011, p. 52). A more complex type of partnership is one that is a “multi-tier partnership” and “involves active participation by many actors at various levels of authority and decision making” (Baker, 2011, p. 53). While all models involve a “strategic apex” headed by both a school superintendent and “college dean”, as well as a “technostructure” of “technical specialists” whose role is “intended to improve the performance of teachers in the school’s technical core (classrooms),” the second level uniquely provides discourse and engagement at multiple levels (Baker, 2011, pp. 47–48). It is this type of partnership that the authors have engaged with, although, as we note below, not every level has been equally engaged in the process, as one might expect in Baker’s ideal multi-tier partnership configuration.

The various tiers described by Baker (2011) can and do interact in some partnerships, with varying amounts of oversight and cohesion, whereas in other partnerships, one tier or group of stakeholders, almost entirely facilitate the collaboration and work of the partnership.

The various stakeholders in our PDS partnerships included: (1) the university liaison, or the contact person representing the university who spends time “on the ground” in the PDS school each week; (2) the school-based site coordinator, who was also, in our cases, usually the principal; (3) teachers who hosted fieldwork observers, student teachers and site-based methods courses; (4) other teachers and school personnel who collaborated on different initiatives; (5) the university PDS coordinator who offered big picture coordination of the PDS relationships across districts and (6) an assistant superintendent that managed the partnership on behalf of the local school district. Although contracts for the partnership have been signed by both the university presidents and school superintendent their direct support and engagement have varied, as discussed below.

At its core, the authors of this article see the role of the intermediary between the institutions as an essential and critical element. Some institutions have chosen the job title of “liaison” for the university employee who spends time working in the P-12 school, managing the leadership and coordination of the partnership, while other institutions name the role differently, such as the role of “professor in residence” (Hall & Freeman, 2014). The liaisons “are the “glue” that sustains university/school partnerships and serve as the conduit between the two partners” (Ferrara, Nath, & Guadarrama, 2014). Of course, in an ideal partnership as noted above, correspondence, discourse, communication, and co-planning do not only occur through the PDS liaison. Rather, instead of serving as a funnel, this role ideally serves as a valuable interface as partnerships begin and grow.

In this article, we describe how we navigated establishing/reestablishing PDS relationships between our university and the local P-12 school district for which we served as PDS liaisons. We address the research questions: (1) How did two PDS liaisons establish and grow a PDS partnership between their university and a local P-12 district? and (2) What were key considerations as they navigated, communicated about, and planned for the goals of the various stakeholders? We then consider the larger implications for how other school–university partnerships might intentionally create a partnership that addresses the sometimes competing, or at least different, goals of the university and P-12 partner schools.

For this qualitative descriptive study, we collected documents such as their PDS liaison yearly reports to the university, reflection journals, emails and notes pertaining to PDS work over the previous five years (Maxwell, 2013). We reviewed this data through multiple readings and discussed it in data analysis sessions, identifying patterns of ideas, issues and questions that emerged. We also engaged in frequency counting and explored the themes that continued to reappear over the years. We interpreted the codes through discussion and memo writing, identifying the following three themes: navigating dissonance between stakeholder goals, collaborating with stakeholders to find shared goals that support both the K-12 schools and teacher preparation, and creating clear guidelines and procedures for collaboration. All told, this work attempts to synthesize the real experiences of working as PDS liaisons and tries to theorize, explain and provide future guidance based on our lived experiences.

Ultimately, our findings raise important questions and provide significant guidance for several of the Nine Essentials, including Essential l: Comprehensive Mission, Essential 2: Clinical Preparation, Essential 3: Professional Learning and Leading, and Essential 6: Articulated Agreements. These questions and guidance are explored in depth below.

Teachers in many public-school districts are presented with many initiatives, from changing curricular programs to collaborative teaching and a range of assessment requirements, from the state level, the district level and the school level. Each year, a teacher may be asked to learn a new math curriculum, a new reading curriculum, pilot a new science curriculum, follow new procedures and methods for managing student behavior, all while addressing the academic, social, and emotional needs of their diverse classes. When we first arrived at our schools as PDS liaisons, some teachers felt that “PDS” was just another initiative on their plates, one that would require their time and energy but ultimately be in vain. This perception was caused by the rapid turnover with previous liaisons, and perhaps too much emphasis on preservice teacher education rather than on the ways that the school(s) would benefit from the partnership. Thus began the need for communication about the goals of PDS, the potential benefits, and the ways that the aphorism “a rising tide floats all ships” could apply to the partnerships’ benefits to all involved. While we presented the goals of PDS, offered handbooks and articles, and ideas of what other PDS relationships had accomplished together, teacher volunteers willing to collaborate were few because of all the other work demands. Without time allocated for this work in “official” times such as faculty meetings and common planning preps, any additional collaboration was voluntary and took place outside the regular school day.

One of the challenges and opportunities for creating a comprehensive mission for a school–university partnership is ensuring that there is interest and investment (in both time and collaboration) from all levels of the organization chart, which is crucial to the success of the PDS partnership. Ultimately, this can take months or years to cultivate and develop. Buy-in for everyone in a school partnership, be it an assistant superintendent, a principal, a teacher or an intern takes many forms. Each stakeholder needs to understand the PDS framework and possibilities for the partnership while agreeing to the partnership’s goals. In terms of cultivating someone who believes in the long-term mission of the PDS, it is especially important that each stakeholder understands potential benefits to their own organization and what the potential benefits are for the other organizations and society at large.

Of course, there must be support at the grassroots level, particularly from the teachers in the school as well as the undergraduate and graduate students who visit the site for field hours, student teaching and sometimes employment while working towards their degrees. In addition, there needs to be interest and investment from the liaisons themselves and that the goals that have been established are achievable. Moving up the organizational pyramid, both the principal of the school and the dean of the school of education in the university itself are essential. But does a school–university partnership end there? At best, both the president of the university and his cabinet-level vice presidents, along with the superintendent and the central office of the local school district, likewise need to be on board and willing participants in the partnership.

One of the most immediate needs before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has been the concept of job matching between schools and universities. Universities produce trained teacher-candidates, and, in a functioning labor market, school districts want and need to hire them. At the top level, there seems to be an alliance of needs. A superintendent of a school district needs to hire X number of new teachers each year, and a nearby university graduates Y students trained to be educators. In an ideal situation, the number of qualified graduates is equal to the needs of the district. Too few graduates means that there are empty teaching positions, which is a current concern in our region (New York State Governor’s Office, 2022) and too many graduates means that recent graduates will have to find jobs far from their homes or in other unrelated fields, as was often the case after the financial crisis of 2008 (Goldhaber, Krieg, Theobald, & Liddle, 2022). In our e-mails, we often noted early in our work, circa 2018, of the students sometimes having challenges finding jobs, and by the end of the study period, in 2024, the opposite, schools needing to fill positions that we did not have newly minted graduates to fill. In a June 2020 end of year report, [Author 1] wrote that “we had a full complement of interns in the fall many of whom were upgraded to full-time positions.” In addition, he noted that “of our graduate students over the last two years, one now works at the middle school as a long-term (multiple year) leave replacement, one as a short-term leave replacement, three TAs, one IA, and two current interns. In short, our students very quickly become integrated into the life of the school and Fox Lane provides them with a great beginning for their teaching careers.”

Job matching is an important part of the equation, and e-mails suggested that this task was an important task of the PDS partnership, but just because there is a match between graduates and job openings does not mean that every individual in the system benefits from the matchmaking in precisely the same way. Consequently, each member of the partnership does not have the same buy-in. Those at the top of the system, the superintendent and the college president certainly do. The superintendent fills their hiring needs, and the college president runs a college that has good job placement for its recent graduates. But what are we to make of the teacher who is asked to host a student teacher, often for little compensation, and what if that placement doesn’t go well? The teacher gives their labor in a way that benefits both the school and the university, but is not necessarily of benefit to the teacher themselves. It seems there are far fewer incentives for each individual teacher to participate in the school–university partnership.

Each year, in the end-of-year report to the Dean, [Author 2] reflected on the state of “the pipeline” of teacher candidates completing field hours at the PDS school, then applying for and serving as an intern in the building, then doing student teaching at the school, and usually moving into paraprofessional and assistant roles. Depending on the overall job market, this pipeline worked in different ways. Early in the partnership, back to 2016–2017, [Author 2] wrote that, “we are developing the intern program and together with the principals, interviewing teacher candidates from our graduate school to serve as interns in the PDS’s. These roles are highly desireable, offering a salary (albeit low), and great experience for their resumes.” By 2020–2021, during the pandemic, many of these interns moved quickly into teaching roles as more substitutes were needed and teachers were leaving their jobs. By 2022–2023, Author 2 wrote,

There is quite a nice pipeline of intern to aide to TA to teacher at these schools, thanks to the fact that the principals value the teacher pool. I think a HUGE difficulty this year was not finding enough interns as we have in the past. It has been difficult finding them in the first place, and then they have been hired quickly as aides or TA’s after that if they show any promise. (JPS, end-of-year report, May 2023).

We have done a few things to improve this mismatch. First, advertising the position to our graduate students has been crucial; marketing is completed by the liaison both through emails, postings through the graduate school, and discussions with students in courses and those who complete fieldwork hours at our schools. This requires communication on multiple levels to make sure that we are recruiting potential interns. As we, the liaisons, talk with potential interns, we also collaborate and communicate with potential teacher mentors to help shape a positive experience for the interns. We think of our students as guests in the classrooms of their host teachers. An individual teacher can say “no” to a student teaching or observation placement, ensuring more genuine buy-in on the part of the teacher. In addition, while teachers are only compensated in the form of a graduate course voucher, these vouchers can be given to family members or colleagues in the PDS district. Anecdotally, some teachers in the school university partnership have noted that they earned an entire master’s degree or certificate in educational leadership through course vouchers that are provided by the partnership.

In addition to maximizing the material incentives that a teacher receives for participating in the partnership, university liaisons hold themselves out as resources for the broader school community in terms of understanding paths for educational advancement. A few examples documented both in e-mails and calendar entries that recorded in-person or Zoom meetings: A teaching assistant wants to earn a bachelor’s degree and become a teacher, but doesn’t know where to start. A library media assistant wants to know where one can earn a master’s degree on-line to become a school librarian. A middle school teacher certified in K-6 education wants to know what coursework he would need to get a secondary extension. A mathematics coordinator is looking to connect high-achieving math students at the high school to county-wide and collegiate mathematics initiatives. While we as liaisons do not have the answers to all these questions ourselves, someone at our university certainly does, and we will often match up educators with higher education colleagues who can best assist them on their educational journeys.

Ultimately, we have tried to move our partnership from something that is less transactional to something more communitarian, yet we are acutely aware that material and moral incentives are strong drivers toward participation in any communal endeavor. While we do not control the macro-purse strings, we have noticed that having some funds for the benefit of stakeholders, particular teachers, and financial resources that they directly control, is very important for the long-term health of a school–university partnership. If a project seems meaningful, and is financially achievable, it is more doable. Helping teachers and school principals envision, articulate, and ultimately self-actualize their goals is an important part of our work. Lastly, as much as possible, we have tried to make the partnership something that is concerned with real, positive change, and seek to do things that undo the busyness of school, not just for the sake of doing things.

The P-12 schools that we partnered with prioritized professional development for their in-service teachers as one of their central goals, hoping that the PDS partnership could and would support professional development offerings for their teachers. Meanwhile, one of the university’s primary goals was to obtain supervised field experiences in P-12 classrooms for preservice teachers, as a part of field-based courses, as sites for fieldwork placements and as full-semester student teaching placements. Therefore, the education and professional growth of teachers at all phases of their careers were central to the goals of the partnership, even though the university and P-12 schools’ main foci were on different phases. We supported each other with these goals – the liaisons themselves offered professional development sessions around topics of expertise, such as literacy instruction (in [Author 2]’s case) and facilitating professional learning communities related to secondary instruction (in JPS’s case) and they liaised with other experts to offer sessions, series, and book clubs to help support teachers in their professional learning. These professional development opportunities, before school, during lunch, after school and online via Zoom, were organized to accommodate the schedule needs and wishes of the teachers. For instance, each school’s steering committee would arrive at goals for the PDS based on needs-assessments and discussion, enabling the funds and professional development time to be focused on such goals as Author 2 noted, such as vocabulary development for English Language Learners through interdisciplinary units, creating student “buddy benches” on the playground, plus collecting a text set for loan in the library about friendship and making friends and then offering school-wide curriculum unit for Friday morning meeting about how the buddy bench would be used, and even offering Science of Reading book clubs based on four different books for teachers to choose from. Author 2 wrote in a report, “There are many moving parts with being at three different schools and having many projects and initiatives occurring. It is difficult to keep up with it all, but over time, I have found that different weeks focus on different things. Having a shared drive is helpful.” Organization of these many initiatives was a challenge for one liaison and the many stakeholders, but not impossible.

Meanwhile, to prepare teacher candidates for licensure (and ensure more qualified teachers for the schools upon graduation), the university needed field placements for preservice teachers. This required that teachers in the schools agree to host observers, helpers, field-based courses and student teachers. Field hours, as required by the state, must be completed by students in various areas – grade level bands, subject areas – with various foci like assessment procedures or classroom management. Both authors of this article conducted at least one field-based course at their PDS schools each year, engaging teaching candidates (TCs) with both theory and practical experience, while also receiving real-time guidance and support from their university instructors (Cibulka, 2009; Barnes & Smagorinsky, 2016; Zeichner, 2010). Together, instructors, TCs, and often also the host classroom teachers debrief about the field experience and make connections (and disconnections) with the course readings and theory (Handsfield, 2015; Collett & Dubetz, 2022). They can also plan lessons and experiences based on their assessments, observations and reflections. The shared experience of these stakeholders with the K-12 students offers more opportunities for nuanced discussion and analysis than when TCs each observe and work with children independently in different settings. When every TC observes and fulfills field hours in various independent locations (not in a field-based course), the instructor must rely solely on the reported events by the TC through journal entries and discussion to coach and mentor the TC. But when the class visits a field setting together, they have a shared practical experience to discuss, reflect on and use for planning purposes (Collett & Dubetz, 2022; Fletcher et al., 2011).

In the best of circumstances, these field-based courses increased the visible on-the-ground partnering because P-12 personnel such as teachers, aides and administrators communicated and collaborated with university personnel such as the professor and liaison as well as the TCs. Furthermore, in many circumstances, “everyone” benefited because the PTs obtained the classroom field experience hours they needed, and the teachers had more hands and help to work with students 1:1 and in small groups. While many teachers welcomed the field-based classes, at other times, some teachers felt the load of collaborating with professors for these classes to be too much given all that they needed to accomplish.

In addition, we try to assist the teachers themselves in their own career aspirations and visions as future leaders and teacher-educators. Do they see themselves as individuals who want to be a curriculum coordinator or an administrator? Perhaps they are interested in working as an adjunct professor. Recently, we have found that some of our best adjunct professors are teachers from our PDS schools who are within 5 to 10 years of retirement. Teacher candidates see the teachers in the schools they visit as founts of knowledge, and having some of the best of them working as adjunct professors reinforces the connection between the undergraduate or graduate classroom and the schools that the visit, observe in, and assist in.

While the pay of an adjunct professor is not necessarily the most, the teacher is recognized with an additional title that indicates their knowledge, wisdom and experience. Teachers planning towards retirement are thinking about “what is next” and while some are looking for a long vacation, others are wondering what paths might exist for continuing in the world of education. We have had many conversations with teachers approaching retirement and explaining options related to becoming an adjunct professor, field supervision, higher educational administration, and in some cases even earning doctoral degrees. Several expressed gratitude to our PDS liaisons, with one writing that they were grateful to be able to give back as a cooperating teacher. Later, after working their first semester as an adjunct professor, they absolutely “LOVE[D] the curriculum” for a course they were teaching, though noted that the dynamics of each future teacher cohort can vary widely.

As described above, the needs of individuals within a partnership can vary from each other. Just as importantly, the needs of a university partner and a local school district can sometimes differ as well. In our local community, this is a particular challenge, as there are more than 40 different local school districts in the county in which North Star University is located. Nominally, in New York State, all educational institutions are under the auspices of the New York State Board of Regents, but there is significant local control for public school districts and universities, both public and private. In our case, the partnership is between a small private university and several local school districts, each with their own superintendents and boards of education.

Besides providing explicit explanation of the minimum requirements for the partnership, articulated agreements, signed by “those at the top” reinforce, at least theoretically, the buy-in of institutional leaders. As part of the PDS agreement, districts paid approximately $2,500 to participate in the partnership with the university, whereby the university provided a professional in the role of liaison, and the funds paid could be used for professional development-related expenses or materials to support student learning. Monies would roll over from one year to the next.

One of the challenges related to buy-in is turnover in executive leadership. In our case, we experienced that turnover: three university presidents, three superintendents of the local school district, six directors of Human Resources on both sides over the course of a five-year period. For the partnership, this meant a dozen different individuals in key decision-making roles, each with their own priorities, values, and understandings of the role of school–university partnerships. Some of the individuals at the executive level barely had time to learn the components of their own job, much less the complex and multi-faceted nature of a school–university partnership. This challenge is not unique to North Star University or its partnership school district. School superintendents serve at most six years, depending on the data set, and college presidents have tenures of similar length. (Barnum, 2018; Pruitt, 2023). Compounding the challenge is that school–university partnerships are a relatively new phenomenon. The National Association of School University Partnerships was only founded in 2005 (NASUP, n.d.). As a result of the relative newness of these sorts of partnerships, many administrators, both at the K-12 level or the college level, did not have experience with a school–university partnership as they themselves made their way through the K-16 system.

A final challenge that turnover in executive leadership roles creates is related to the articulated agreements themselves. If each party thinks of their narrow self-interest, a partnership agreement can make less financial sense. “What is in it for me?” is harder to articulate to a leader who is only in place for one to two years before they move on to another opportunity. Why should a school district contribute a few thousand dollars to pay for a liaison? Why should a university provide compensation or a course release to the faculty who work in the partnership? Often, the success of School–University Partnerships is measured in longer periods of years or decades. A first-year college student might not be hired for a job for another six years, but a good school university partnership can give that student valuable experience as an observer, substitute teacher, intern, teaching assistant well before their first full-time job. Likewise, students who get to know North Star University through meeting undergraduates and graduates from the university or attending a tour of the university campus, which has become a regular theme of the partnership, are likely to attend North Star University for college at rates higher than non-PDS peer school districts.

More longitudinal research on how school districts and universities organize and sustain their partnerships in the 5-to-20-year range is warranted. This would offer more models and visions for how these partnerships can be organized and also help to understand if the concept of the mismatch – i.e. what is needed by a school vs. what the university can offer exacerbates or is ameliorated over time. It would also be interesting to see if more consistent top-level leadership leads to more thriving PDS partnerships. Also, given the disparate needs and measures of success for schools versus universities, coming up with criteria for measuring, in quantitative terms, the success of a partnership should be developed.

The nation needs teachers and has a system of public education. Yet, the ways that we prepare teachers for the role are often organized at the local grassroots level, whereby the infrastructure with local school districts for preparing the next generation of teachers to serve all our nation’s children relies on a tenuous and often ad hoc structure. Each PDS relationship that is built is based on the buy-in and collaboration of individual schools and universities and often lacks an institutional imprimatur or infrastructure at the state level. Multi-tiered systems such as the PDS partnership rely on communication and collaboration between various stakeholders. Specific stakeholders in the system, namely the PDS liaison, as well as the university president and the school superintendent or their empowered designee, are particularly important to ensure success and thriving. Guidelines and templates for routines and structures of PDS would support the initial process of connecting and building the PDS are needed, a how-to manual for PDS creation and thriving. In addition, financial compensation for P-12 teachers to participate in PDS would be helpful, seeing it more clearly linked to the core of their work as teachers and workers.

In this article, we, two PDS liaisons, described our processes of collaborating with local PDS schools to meet the goals and needs of the various stakeholders while strengthening the PDS partnership. We found that this was best accomplished through articulating goals and measures of success for each stakeholder as well as defining and embracing shared goals and related goals for “the field of education” and society at large. School–university partnerships that are newer or are being relaunched can participate in collaborative decision-making to articulate and accomplish goals for each of the various stakeholders, thereby strengthening the advantages of the partnership for the preservice teachers and P-12 schools, including students, teachers, administration and families.