Them that’s got? How school partnerships can perpetuate inequalities

Abstract

Education policy makers often encourage public schools to form partnerships with community organizations, businesses, and higher education institutions. In theory, such partnerships can help struggling schools gain resources that they are unable to acquire through local, state, and federal funding mechanisms. However, as Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell explains, the schools with the greatest need are not the most likely ones to form partnerships. The likelihood of forming partnerships tends to be linked not with the intensity of a school’s needs but, rather, with the strength of the school’s existing social network — which tends to favor schools that already have more advantages. Schools have greater success forming partnerships if they already have established partnerships, if they have close connections to potential partners, if there’s limited competition for partners, and if they’re part of a dense network where it’s easy to find connections to potential partners.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Arthur

W.B.

(1990, February). Positive feedbacks in the economy. Scientific American, 262 (2), 92–99.

Baker

B.D.

Corcoran

S.P.

(2012). The stealth inequities of school funding: How state and local school finance systems perpetuate inequitable student spending. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress.

Bourdieu

(1986). The forms of capital. In Richardson

J.G.

(Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York, NY: Greenwood Press.

Bridwell-Mitchell

E.N.

(2017). Them that’s got: How tie formation in partnership networks gives high schools differential access to social capital. American Educational Research Journal, 54 (6), 1221–1255.

Coleman

(1988). Social capital and the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S120.

Educational Partnership Act (P.L. 100-418 Congress, 20 U.S.C. 5031-5039 Cong. Rec. § Title VI, Subtitle A, Chapter 5). (1988).

Giddens

(1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Granovetter

(1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91 (3), 481–510.

Hanushek

(1997). Assessing the effects of school resources on student performance: An update. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 19 (2), 141–164.

10.

Honig

M.I.

(2004). The new middle management: Intermediary organizations in education policy implementation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 26 (1), 65–87.

11.

Kozol

(1992). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

12.

Lin

(2001). Social capital: A theory of social structure and action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

13.

Ouchi

(2003). Making schools work: A revolutionary plan to get your children the education they need. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

14.

Sanders

M.G.

(2014). Principal leadership for school, family, and community partnerships: The role of a systems approach to reform implementation. American Journal of Education, 120 (2), 233–255.