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Many researchers partner with schools but may be unfamiliar with practices for initiating contact and sustaining relationships with school leaders. Partnering with schools requires significant effort from the researcher to nurture communication and trust. This can pose challenges for researchers who are new to the field, have relocated to a new university or need to rebuild relationships due to transitions in school staffing.

In this mixed-methods study, we interviewed and surveyed school and district leaders in Delaware to learn how researchers can best communicate and form relationships with schools and districts.

We found no singular best method exists to initiate contact with schools and districts. Rather, researchers should consider the unique needs of the local context. Leaders’ decision to participate in research was most influenced by their own interest in the research topic, alignment with schools’ needs and researchers’ willingness to build a relationship with the local education agency.

Despite broad acknowledgment about the importance of school–university partnerships, few studies directly engage educators in discussing their goals, preferences and needs when working with researchers. We sought to formalize an understanding of best practices researchers can consider when initiating contact and building relationships with schools, directly from the perspective of school and district leaders. Developing these understandings from practitioners ensures the information authentically represents the perspectives of those who researchers seek to connect with, rather than assumptions of the researcher.

This study investigated a teacher leadership program created by a partnership between a large US urban district, their teachers’ union and a university. We were part of an action-research partnership that examined the program’s implementation.

We employed a hermeneutic phenomenology methodology and mixed-method data collection methods and analysis strategies to understand the experiences of program participants. Data included interviews with program participants, union leaders and district administrators along with an analysis of projects that participants created during the program.

Teacher leadership programs were legitimized through diverse stakeholder collaboration, and involvement of a university partner was viewed as a value-add for teachers. Formalized teacher leadership programs professionalize teachers through expanding professional networks, developing leadership skills and lifting teachers’ voices. When teacher leader work is directed towards school improvement, teachers’ unique perspectives yield varied problems of practice and goals in ways that help schools address these problems.

This study has implications for districts seeking to create teacher leadership opportunities and for districts and universities seeking to partner for in-service professional learning opportunities.

This study underscores the role effective district-union-university partnerships can play in fostering pipelines for teacher leader development, which can better position school improvement efforts to be sustained over time.

As school districts evolve in their ability to actively support schools and educators, they must simultaneously contend with external policies that create additional demands on time and resources. This includes accountability policies aimed at increasing district and school capacity. This study uses Malen and Rice’s (2004) dual dimensions of capacity building to look at how district and charter leaders responded to the demands of Michigan’s Partnership Model, a district-based approach to school turnaround, focusing on how they tried to build capacity in response to the policy and whether and why these capacity building approaches were perceived as productive.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 out of 29 Partnership leaders between October 2019 to March 2020 in the second year of policy implementation. Data were analyzed using a combination of index-coding and thematic analysis.

Most leaders perceived the resources associated with the reform as useful, but the productivity of capacity building efforts was limited because some resources were not adequately matched to what they perceived as a core problem: the recruitment and retention of teachers. Engagement with the reform resulted in building informational and social capital because it fostered collaboration and continuous improvement processes, but leaders perceived technical partnerships as more productive than community partnerships.

Turnaround reforms like the Partnership Model that increase resources for districts and schools likely offer a better chance at success than those that simply focus on accountability threats without accompanying support because they give leaders new opportunities to coordinate and align resources, processes and ideas.

The purpose of this paper is to present the author's commentary on the special issue of Journal of Educational Administration entitled “Systemwide reform: examining districts under pressure”.

The major thesis of this commentary and reflection on the preceding papers is that there is a need to recognize that “school districts” as known in the USA are examples of a more general phenomenon of intermediary organizational entities in education systems in North America and elsewhere in the world and that there is a need to problematize, not take for granted, the form, purpose, and influence of these mediating layers of the school system on the quality and improvement of schools, and on the implementation of government policies that are intended to regulate and support education in schools.

This issue of the Journal of Educational Administration presents a series of papers that highlight different aspects and contemporary trends in school district practice and research – organizational characteristics associated with district effectiveness (see Trujillo this issue), how districts are responding to political and public demands for accountability (see Hamilton et al., this issue), the invention of school district authorities as portfolio managers of diverse school provider systems (see Marsh et al., this issue), and how social communication networks linking school and district staff interface with the use of evidence to support school improvement (see Finnigan and Daly, as well as Wohlstetter and Smith this issue).

The simple thesis of this commentary is to argue that school districts function as an intermediate level of education governance, management, and support within national and state education systems, and that current research and discussion on the school district role in improving and sustaining the quality of education would be strengthened by broadening the scope of research and discussion to alternative kinds of intermediate level governance and support systems that exist in North America and in other regions of the world.

This study is based on the earlier work of Iannaccone and Lutz, Kirkendall and Le Doux and Burlingame and uses socio‐economic data obtained from 77 school districts in Massachusetts through the period 1963–1972. The study examines a series of hypotheses related to the “gap” that may develop between community demand and school board response. Some of the findings are (i) the Iannaccone‐Lutz model of school board member incumbent defeat is valid and the “gap” between community demands and the school board's response is an important factor in the operational model; (ii) the school board's response to community's demands (tax rate) is an important variable in determining the “gap” resulting in incumbent defeat and in predicting the variance in this political phenomenon in school districts; (iii) socio‐economic‐political indicators of school district change selected by Kirkendall are related to school board member incumbent defeat.

Can school districts become too large whereby their size exceeds their point of efficiency? To investigate this question, all K-12 school districts in New Jersey were divided into three groups based on student body size. In a comparison of six average cost measures, larger districts were found to be more efficient on only one of the six measures. A more optimum size for school districts appeared to be in moderate sized districts. The theoretical grounds for this investigation regarded the suggested effects of vertical and horizontal decentralization.

The LAUSD is the largest school district in the State and is charged with the responsibility of educating over one‐fifth of the children in California. Taken individually, each of the LAUSD’s eleven local districts would rank in the top twenty in the State in terms of student population. The District is LA County’s second largest employer, and with an annual operating and capital budget of over nine billion dollars, it brings together a diverse range of active and dynamic stakeholders. In 2000 the LAUSD found itself at a crossroads. In response to growing criticism and the threat of a State‐mandated break‐up due to the poor performance of their schools, the District created eleven mini‐districts to improve accountability and take instructional programs closer to the people who use them. This paper provides background on the LAUSD’s decentralization effort and power sharing aspects of the District’s self‐imposed break‐up, and recommendations for addressing these issues are postulated.

This paper shares findings from a multi-year literacy professional development partnership between a school district and university (2014–2019). We share this case of a Literacy Cohort initiative as an example of cross-institutional professional development situated within several of NAPDS’ nine essentials, including professional learning and leading, boundary-spanning roles and reflection and innovation (NAPDS, 2021).

We asked, “In what ways did the Cohort initiative create conditions for community and collaboration in the service of meaningful literacy reforms?” Drawing on social design methodology (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), we sought to generate and examine the educational change associated with this multi-year initiative. Our data set included programmatic data, interviews (N = 30) and artifacts of literacy teaching, learning and leading.

Our findings reflect the emphasis areas that are important to educators in the partnership: diversity by design, building relationships through collaboration and rooting literacy reforms in teacher leadership. Our discussion explores threads of reciprocity, simultaneous renewal and boundary-spanning leadership and their role in sustaining partnerships over time.

This paper contributes to our understanding of building and sustaining a cohort model of multi-year professional development through the voices, perspectives and experiences of teachers, faculty and district administrators.

The purpose of this study is to estimate the impact of conflict witnessed in Pakistan on the enrolment rates of boys and girls. Pakistan has the world’s second-highest number of out-of-school children, with an estimated 22.8 million children aged 5–16 years not attending school.

By merging data on violence with the data on enrolment rates, this paper finds that exposure to violence is correlated with a decline in overall district-level enrolment rates in the short run at primary-level schools and middle-level schools.

However, for boys, violence is also negatively correlated with enrolment rates at middle-level schools in the medium run. One possible mechanism tested in this paper is the potential substitution of boys into the labour market during a period of conflict.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper adds to the existing literature in several ways. Firstly, the effect of conflict on the labour market by impacting schooling for boys and girls is examined for the first time in Pakistan. Secondly, the district-level data set on enrolment rates used for this study is novel and has not been used before for this type of analysis. Thirdly, while this study strengthens the evidence that the short run effects of conflict are stronger than the long-run effects, it also confirms the negative effects of conflict do not fade away immediately. Fourthly, this study emphasizes that each conflict is unique in terms of its heterogeneous effects across different cohorts, such as gender, as these effects are dependent on the mechanism through which conflict impacts each individual.

District-university partners increasingly rely on “grow-your-own” licensure programs to address teacher shortages. Because vacancies in special education represent a chronic issue, our district-university partnership developed LEAP – the Licensed Educators’ Accelerated Pathway, successfully preparing 26 paraprofessionals as special education teachers (SEs). We describe a model university-district partnership in which we collaborated to design and implement paraprofessionals’ SE licensure program.

In this general review, we describe a district-university partnership collaboration that resolved barriers experienced by paraprofessionals working toward licensure in special education (Essential #4, Reflection and Innovation). The specialized design and partnership solutions were grounded in SE preparation research literature.

25 (28 entered the program and 25 completed) paraprofessionals from one large urban and several regional districts completed special education licensure through LEAP. Slightly more than half of LEAP participants were Black or Hispanic (see Table 1), contributing to the diversification of SE workforce. University-district partnership was successful in designing and delivering a program that allowed participants: a) to remain employed, b) attend evening classes in their geographic region or online, c) complete all field experiences in sponsoring districts (Essential #2) and d) receive concierge advising from a “completion coach.” We describe solutions to barriers experienced by paraprofessionals and advocate for district-university collaboration to address chronic teacher shortages.

Limitations include lack of data on success of program completers during their first year of teaching as they began this work in Fall 2023. Further, because the participating district was large and urban, generalization of program details for small and rural districts is difficult.

Practical tips for developing grow-your-own special education licensure programs are providing. Detailed descriptions of barriers candidates experienced and ways the district-university partners resolved these issues are included. Programs like the one described has the potential to positively impact teacher pipeline issues.

The program described provided highly-trained teachers to fill chronic vacancies in special education in three participating districts/agencies. Because students receiving special education services are at risk for school failure and are disproportionately impacted by teacher turnover, addressing this area through grow-your-own licensure programs represents a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. Further, upskilling diverse paraprofessionals to licensed teacher roles represent an economic boost, which they might not otherwise have achieved.

Available research literature signals alarm over persistent teacher shortages in hard-to-staff districts and lack of diversity in the teacher workforce, but few published accounts describe successful programs. Partner collaboration fostered a re-imagining of course formatting and delivery to accommodate adult learners, avoiding problems often reported with alternative programs.