Rethinking School Partnerships

Abstract

This article approaches educational partnerships from two perspectives not dominant in the current literature. First, it adopts an organizational perspective, analyzing the participants in a school, corporate foundation, university, and college partnership from the institutional dynamics of each agency. Focusing on preexistent organizational characteristics rather than on the group dynamics created by various forms of partnering may provide a more parsimonious way of conceptualizing what is a very complex phenomenon. Second, because partnerships are by definition the creation of networks, success is examined by looking at the potential to create social capital. Following Putnam, social capital refers to dense networks of reciprocal social relations.