The Article
This article by Associate Professor Troy Mariage and colleague Arthur Garmon (Western Michigan University) describe their five-year project that sought to develop a collaborative site of practice and inquiry among two universities, the primary and elementary schools in a poor rural town, and the district that served these schools.

Discussion
The authors note that there is an urgent need to demonstrate how school-university partnerships can affect student achievement in the most underperforming schools. “Unfortunately, there has been scant evidence that these relationships result in improved learning for large numbers of students, especially the most at-risk learners…” Their intervention, known as Project PREPARE, involved a poor rural community in Michigan. The site for the study was a primary (K-2) and an elementary (grades 3-5) school, which served 750 students and employed 39 faculty members. Test scores indicated the district was the lowest achieving of the 37 districts in southwest Michigan. Two universities and one Intermediate School District were included in the development of the collaborative site. The project involved three types of collaboration: (a) providing consultative and material support to changes initiated by the district, (b) creating new collaborative structures that could serve as sites for advancing teacher and student learning, and (c) providing conceptual leadership to help the district develop a long-range systemic change initiative. During the course of the project, there were steady improvements in student achievement in reading and mathematics on multiple measures, including state-mandated criterion-referenced tests and curriculum-based measures. In fact, the combined reading and math increases were greater in the project school during the study period than in 9 of the 10 closest comparison schools in Michigan. The authors conclude that Project PREPARE is not a model that necessarily can or should be implemented in other underperforming schools, for “school-university partnerships will continue to be highly idiosyncratic.” Instead, they suggest that the project is an example of a case in which a school-university partnership advanced teacher and student learning “in one of our most underperforming schools.”

What It Means To You
Mariage and Garmon are careful to point out that each school-university partnership poses its own set of challenges. However, as is clear from Project PREPARE, the collaborations can yield positive results for teachers and student learning. In our most under performing schools, there is often a need to “reculture” schools into learning organizations. Partnerships are one strategy that schools can use in the that process. The school/university partnership can serve as a catalyst for generating the expertise needed to provide conceptual clarity to the change process and sustain these processes over time.

For More Information
Mariage, T. V. & Garmon, M. A. (2003). A case of educational change: Improving student achievement through a school-university partnership. Remedial and Special Education, (24)4, 215-234.

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