Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Leveraging Education Partnerships for Comprehensive Services: Opportunities and Challenges

(Education)

There is ample evidence that out-of-school factors such as homelessness, hunger, family and community resources and support, and physical and mental health affect students’ academic learning and non-academic needs in K-12 schools and that high rates of neighborhood poverty are associated with greater educational challenges due to higher levels of stress, fewer outside resources and opportunities, and less robust support systems, among other factors. In recent years, much attention in educational research and policy has focused on schools as focal points for wraparound services to address student needs more comprehensively, including the out-of-school factors that relate to student learning and providing early childhood, tutoring, and enrichment services to help address opportunity gaps. Because these services extend beyond the traditional academic purview of schools, they often entail partnerships or cross-sectoral collaborations between schools and other governmental agencies, universities, and community organizations.

 

Such partnerships represent significant potential for synergy. They can take advantage of expertise from diverse fields, achieve efficiencies through improved coordination and communication as well as better use of slack resources and reduction of duplicate services and bureaucracy, and improve outreach by using schools as a single point of contact for parents and children. Conversely, partnerships require considerable effort and coordination to be sustainable and can run up against competing prerogatives and priorities, insufficient resources invested in building a successful partnership, and lack of commitment and concerns about free-riding on the part of some partners. Open research questions remain about the effectiveness and economic efficiency of partnerships to provide wraparound services, characteristics of successful partnerships, and the conditions under which partnerships will thrive.

 

This panel examines dimensions of partnerships in support of comprehensive or wraparound services through multiple theoretical, disciplinary, and methodological lenses. One paper presents findings of an economic evaluation of the costs and benefits of a particular university-school-community partnership using new causal impact evaluation evidence to assess the effectiveness and economic efficiency of a specific partnership, as well as glean lessons about the sustainability of university-school partnerships in general. A second paper provides an analysis of rich qualitative data on eight partnerships across the United States showing pitfalls and promise with suggestions about the limits of what partnerships can and should be expected to accomplish. A final paper presents a cost analysis of an early childhood-literacy focused literacy program presenting both methodological innovations in analyzing costs with missing data, as well as insights into partnership cost-effectiveness and the resources required to implement a successful partnership model.