Piecing It Together:
How HGSE Is Forming Partnerships to Solve Educational Challenges
by Mary Tamer
The problems facing education, says Lesser Professor and Acting Dean
Kathleen McCartney, are too much for one discipline alone.
"It's been an emergent idea," she says, "that we, as a faculty, can be more effective if we have deep partnerships with others."
Across the board, a number of HGSE faculty have seized upon this entrepreneurial notion, forming cross collaborations with faculty at Harvard Business School (HBS), the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Harvard Medical School (HMS), and Harvard Law School (HLS)--as well as outside organizations--to share resources in the name of research, grant acquisitions, and, ultimately, the widespread dissemination of knowledge.
As Thompson Professor and Academic Dean Richard Murnane sees it, "Getting people with different knowledge bases and different sets of skills together to discuss strategies for ameliorating extremely important social problems is the best of what Harvard has to offer."
McCartney and Murnane know of this firsthand, having partnered with Eliot Professor John Willett on a paper regarding the Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI), with each of the three bringing a vast, yet diverse, set of skills to the table.
"Dick's an economist, John's a methodologist, and I am a developmental psychologist," says McCartney, "so we each bring a different kind of knowledge to bear on the project at hand. With our three voices, used collectively, this paper will be better than one we would have written alone."
Across the campus, Murnane and McCartney's sentiments--which are echoed by Harvard President Lawrence Summers--are not only being heeded, but embraced, as a number of faculty in recent years have paired with fellow professors and neighboring institutions for AGI, Family Connections, the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), Cross Role Cohort, and Project IF, to name a few.
Still, with the name recognition of an institution like Harvard, and the vast intellectual human resources at its disposal, one can only begin to imagine the potential long-term effects that such cross-collaborative partnerships may bring.
"The synergies and economies of scale," says Kennedy School Lecturer Ronald Ferguson, "are often underexploited."
Achievement Gap Initiative
It is a quandary that has both plagued and intrigued educators, economists, statisticians, and sociologists alike: what are the root causes and ultimate cures for the ongoing achievement gap that has black and Latino students underperforming academically compared to their white and Asian counterparts?
"People have been talking about the achievement gap forever, and no one knows what to do about it."
"People have been talking about the achievement gap forever," says HGSE Lecturer
Katherine Boles, a longtime public school teacher, "and no one knows what to do about it."
"As a teacher I watched it occur…and I knew that my black students…were always at the bottom of my class. It was frustrating, and I was really intrigued by the question of the achievement gap. When this initiative began, I asked to be involved."
It is now Harvard's chance to address the multitude of related issues through its Achievement Gap Initiative. This year-old effort--conceived by Warren Professor and former Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann--involves a few dozen faculty from across the university's community, a virtual "dream team" of individuals who represent a spectrum of subject expertise and philosophies, including HGSE's McCartney, Murnane, Boles, Assistant Professor John Diamond, Professor Thomas Kane, Professor Daniel Koretz, Associate Professor Bridget Terry Long, Assistant Professor Vivian Shu Ming Louie, Professor Gary Orfield, Assistant Professor Mica Pollock, Associate Professor Mark Warren, and Lecturer Richard Weissbourd.
According to Ferguson, the faculty chair and director of AGI, the potential outcome of the collaboration may be too early to measure, but "there are some conversations going on that might not be going on" had this group not formed.
"We're still in the process of crafting a long-term vision of how it is we work together….It's a challenge to find ways to engage us collaboratively," says Ferguson, acknowledging that "it is a dream team, but we haven't yet fully conceived the dream agenda."
Even without a codified agenda in place, progress is already under way, with three forums held over the course of the 2004–05 school year related to the achievement gap, and a conference held in June among the HSGE, KSG, and FAS faculty members involved with AGI, as well as Harvard Law School's Charles Ogletree and Lani Guinier, educational consultants, and a handful of school practitioners. In the works is a list of research topics and projects for the group to pursue, with an additional goal of Ferguson's to hold meetings two to three times a year, where groups of AGI faculty can present work relative to their efforts. A longer-range plan includes the production of a series of edited books, each of which correlate to various achievement gap issues.
On a related front, Ferguson has formed another partnership with Ogletree, who began the Law School's O'Connor Project, initiated in response to a statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that affirmative action policies would no longer be needed in 25 years. The project is now co-directed by Ferguson and Ogletree.
"We were at risk of being redundant, so we just merged the two agendas," says Ferguson. "It's about identifying research possibilities and getting that research done, and connecting with the fields of policy and practice for two-dimensional learning." The O'Connor Project, he continues, "is the interface between research and practice."
Among AGI's research goals are four main areas of focus: accountability; coping with disparity; college access and success; and parenting and parental engagement.
"I think it's plausible," says Ferguson, "that within a generation or two, we can get to a place--after you've adjusted for a parent's level of education--where race and ethnicity will not be a predictor of a student's school achievement or test grades. That's the achievement gap I'm interested in…that's the ball my eye is on."
Family Connections
Bill Beardslee is quick to point out that the federally funded Head Start program has always come under the onus of the Department of Health & Human Services, not the Department of Education, as some might expect. This nuance is hardly lost on Beardslee, who, as head of the Department of Psychiatry at Children's Hospital in Boston, knows too well the importance of the earlyeducation program for low-income families from the mental health perspective.
With recent statistics showing that up to 48 percent of Head Start mothers are depressed--with further evidence pointing to the harmful effects of that depression on young children--Beardslee, a professor of child psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has joined with HGSE Associate Professor Catherine Ayoub (codirector of HGSE's Risk and Prevention Program), HGSE Lecturer Caroline Watts, and Mary Watson-Avery of Children's Hospital Boston to establish the Family Connections project, a multi-year, multimillion-dollar effort to develop a model to help Head Start families deal with the adversity they face.
"This is one of the most exciting projects I have ever been a part of," says Beardslee. "It really is an attempt to engage and address a large social problem."
"This gives us a testing ground," says Ayoub, "to build a national model."
Family Connections, says Beardslee, provided "an opportunity to influence Head Start," a 40-year-old program that involves more than 900,000 children each year from birth to age five, spread out into 48,000 classrooms in the United States. The initial effort, he says, will be focused in Boston, in conjunction with forces from Children's Hospital Boston, Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), Dimock Community Health Center, and Associated Early Care and Education.
To date, Family Connections--directed by Watson-Avery--has allowed HGSE and the other invested organizations to place teams of professionals in education and mental health in seven local Head Start centers. The program uses an approach to support both parents as well as Head Start staff in "building their capacity to engage positively with their children and with the Early Head Start/Head Start program," as explained in the program's description.
"We have a manual that we will be refining and building upon," explains Ayoub, "and we have a great opportunity to have a demonstration model [available] nationally. We're giving the national Head Start organization a guide, and we can test it out in our local communities."
"The entrepreneurial piece," says Beardslee, "is recognizing that the opportunity exists. This kind of collaboration can increase the exchange of each institution [and we] agreed that it was the best way to go to bring the institutions together."
Ayoub notes that their grant is unusual for HGSE for another reason: it focuses on intervention and evaluation, rather than research. According to the Family Connections white paper, the preventative intervention approach has "two components: centerbased strategies, including training and consultation for staff to build skills in dealing with children and their parents who struggle with depression; and home-based strategies, to increase parent engagement, including home visitation, outreach to hard-to-reach parents, and community resource networking and referral services."
HGSE doctoral candidates will be key members of the evaluation team, says Ayoub, which is "a critical way for us to honor the commitment of this institution to train master's and doctoral students."
Another outcome of the project is that Beardslee is now listed among HGSE's faculty, and Ayoub, a registered nurse and psychologist, is back among the staff listed at Children's Hospital.
"The entrepreneurial notion of connecting across programs in the university is something I have been trying to do for some time," says Ayoub. "For us, it greatly strengthens what we are doing in risk and prevention and in our doctoral program."
Public Education Leadership Project (PELP)
From the outset, it appears to be an interesting merger of two dissimilar institutions, garnering the attention of the August 31 issue of Education Week for its unique approach to improving student achievement by starting at the top of the public school pyramid: its leadership.
With a preliminary test group of nine urban school systems, the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) now enters its third year as a joint effort undertaken by both HGSE and Harvard Business School faculty to work with school superintendents, principals, and their top lieutenants on improving their own leadership model through the integration of management and business practices.
"Educational improvement is a very challenging enterprise," says Pforzheimer Professor Susan Moore Johnson. "Sometimes those outside education suggest that lessons from business, if applied, could quickly transform and improve schools, but the reality always proves to be much more difficult.
"By combining expertise from education and business in PELP, we hope that participants approach their work with new insights and strategies, while respecting what is known about teaching, learning, and public policy."
With four main areas of focus--strategic alignment; executing strategy; human capital management; and design of resource allocation and accountability systems--PELP entails a weeklong, on-campus executive summer workshop as well as periodic onsite visits by HBS and HGSE faculty during the school year to the participating districts: Boston; Anne Arundel County and Montgomery County, Maryland; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Minneapolis; San Diego; and San Francisco.
"What's novel is getting university faculty and students to engage in a collaborative enterprise with public school educators," says Thompson Professor and Academic Dean Richard Murnane. "Your hope is that the work will alter the way that people in leadership positions think about the challenges that they face and the most effective ways to go about meeting those challenges, and provide access to the best research evidence on how to meet these challenges. It's both creating knowledge and disseminating knowledge."
On the creation end, participating faculty on both sides are tracking the effectiveness of PELP's work to date in the form of case studies, with the ultimate goal of creating a set of tools that public school leaders throughout the country can utilize within their own systems.
"Over two years, teams within each district have developed new skills and ways of understanding their work," says Johnson. "Having sustained time and support from the faculty to work together on their problems has proved to be extremely valuable. One of the most important payoffs, however, is that these districts have come to recognize that they can learn a great deal from each other. Over time, they've come to share information and lessons learned. We write teaching cases based on the districts' experiences, and the discussions of their strategies, successes, and failures have been instructive for all of us."
"The proof of this is going to be: is there any value added by the work that people do in this setting, ultimately, to the performance of schools?" Anrig Professor
Richard Elmore stated to Education Week. "If we can't meet that criterion, then somebody else should be doing this."
Project IF: Inventing the Future
As director of HGSE's Project IF: Inventing the Future, Lecturer Michael Nakkula stresses the importance of the partnership formed with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), an organization that works to improve the academic performance of low-income students through the integration of entrepreneurship in the classroom.
"It's a movement," says Nakkula, co-director of the school's Risk and Prevention Program, "for teaching lower-income kids to create things, and not just become part of the system."
The NFTE principles of building upon the existing strengths of low-income students to achieve academic success jive perfectly with Project IF's philosophy, as outlined on their website, that the "shift from problem to possibility is at the core of what we term invention, as opposed to prevention or intervention. Our mission is to help youth invent their futures by working proactively in the present."
For Nakkula, now in the midst of building a four-city study--in Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Boston, and Chicago--the results of the NFTE work to date speak for themselves, and include a noticeable improvement in the college interests of students involved, which correlates to the number of students who ultimately go to college.
The creation of a class on entrepreneurship in a high school, says Nakkula, "tends to be appealing to students who see education as irrelevant…and it has a popular appeal that helps kids connect with education, and that's the reason for teaching it."
Nakkula is also engaged in the Early College High School Initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped establish a five-year course of study in troubled high schools that can lead to an associate's degree for participating students. Schools, such as the two currently involved (in Dayton, Ohio, and Los Angeles), partner with local colleges to provide a full range of course offerings. Another Project IF partnership, with Massachusetts General Hospital, allows the opportunity to train counselors and teachers on "what gets in the way of learning."
As more and more of the Ed school's researchers, faculty members, and educators move forward with similar--or even dissimilar--partnerships to AGI, PELP, and others, one thing is certain: the ideology behind cross-collaborative work on Harvard's campus seems to be here to stay.
"Just putting more resources into doing the same things, over and over again, will not solve the pressing educational problems that we have," says Murnane. "The challenge is to find new, more effective ways of doing things."
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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