By Joanne M. Haas

The Milwaukee Partnership Academy may be the nation’s most surprising education alliance, tapping the strengths of often opposing political powerhouses in the ongoing pursuit of a strong public school system and a vital city economy.

But it took a promise of secrecy to get this collection of business, union, education and community groups to the table to work as allies on behalf of children and teachers.

“I have to believe that was the key,” said Bob Lehmann, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association.

“We have spent almost a year now developing a model of what a high performance classroom should look like. We’re about ready to roll it out. It has had the input of teachers across the district.” ________ Bob Lehmann

It was 2000, the year before Lehmann became MTEA president, when three well-known local education leaders seized upon a national emphasis on partnership through collaboration. They were Sam Carmen, executive director of MTEA, former Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Spence Korte and former University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Nancy Zimpher.

With an eye on using federal Title I and Title II dollars and other grants to help teachers help students read at grade level, the three set out to convince not only their own institutions to join this community-wide partnership, but also the leaders of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, Private Industry Council of Milwaukee County, Milwaukee Area Technical College and the Milwaukee School Board.

It wasn’t easy, but eventually they became the seven initial members of the Milwaukee Partnership Academy’s Executive Committee. The Executive Committee has since grown to include Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Sister Joel Read of the Greater Milwaukee Committee and Daniel J. Bader of the Helen Bader Foundation as well as successors for Korte and Zimpher who have left their positions.

“They made a pact that when the Executive Committee would meet, they would be there. They wouldn’t send a substitute,” Lehmann said of the original seven. “And they would hold their meetings in closed session. There would not be minutes, and there would not be an opportunity for the public to be there.

“That is the beauty of the closed door meeting. You can take the gloves off,” he said, adding the privacy allows for free discussion. “You’d want to be a fly on the wall in those meetings.”

“It is very, very uncommon to have the business community and the union at the table as equal partners.” ________ Christine Anderson

Christine Anderson, a former MTEA president who is now the Partnership’s executive director, said the closed format allows for these rare allies to form partnerships within the group. While each group may come in with a slightly different angle on the issue, Anderson said, it always comes down to the importance of having an educated workforce.

“Most of the partnerships around the United States are between a university system and a school district,” said Anderson, a former English teacher. “It is very, very uncommon to have the business community and the union at the table as equal partners.

“I don’t know of any other district that is structured like us,” she said. “I don’t know of any other urban district that is getting the kind of results that we are as well.”

Two years ago, one of every two MPS children in 4th grade were reading at grade level, Anderson said. “Now, two out of three are on grade level.”

Comprehensive literacy
The mission of the Partnership is to have all children at grade level in reading, writing and mathematics, Anderson said. But the first initiative was comprehensive literacy.

“So how do teachers implement something? We spent a good year just talking about what comprehensive literacy meant and what the best methods were to implement that strategy,” Anderson said.

The comprehensive literacy program, which began in 2002, calls for skills development and activities that include reading, research, writing, listening, speaking and deep thinking.

In spite of budget strains, the Partnership agreed to seek literacy coaches for nearly all district schools.

“They were all new positions,” Lehmann said of the 160 coaches who were hired. The literacy coaches are teachers in the classroom, but not in classrooms considered their own. The coaches go into the classroom to model the best practices teachers in any subject can use to improve literacy.

“Having a literacy coach in each building enables teachers to engage in job-embedded professional development,” Anderson said, adding a handful of district schools do not have a coach.

These 160 coaches are trained by seven literacy specialists who are trained utilizing professional development funds, Anderson said.

District schools, however, were not expected to shoulder all the costs of hiring the literacy coaches and providing the training, thanks to some of the $57 million in federal and private grants the Partnership has received. The Partnership matched funding of the positions and helped create the structure to support the district’s more than 6,000 teachers to improve literacy among the district’s 100,000 students.

In addition to the federal Title I and Title II grants, the Partnership has collected grants from the Carnegie Corporation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Milwaukee-based Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation and other businesses and foundations in the Milwaukee area.

Two years ago, the Partnership’s literacy framework was expanded to mathematics, and Partnership funds were allocated to help train about 200 math teacher leaders in schools throughout the Milwaukee district.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Lehmann said, adding some schools and union officials had to be sold on the idea. The structure sought by the Partnership for each school included the creation of learning teams -- ideally small three-member panels that provide teacher support, enable professional development, and collect and interpret data about that school’s education plan.

The learning team, Lehmann said, is the principal, literacy coach, math lead teacher and others appointed by the specific school.

It’s all about building teacher leaders, Anderson said of how the Partnership creates and funds its agenda. “We are building the capacity of the teachers to stay in the classroom in leadership roles -- to embed the professional development.

“This is teachers supporting teachers,” she said, citing an example of a classroom teacher seeking “best practice” help from the literacy coach on staff in the same building.

There is also discussion about how to improve mentoring so new teachers feel supported. “We have an awful retention problem,” Lehmann said. “We’ve lost 1,300 teachers in the last two years.”

Lehmann, as a member of the Partnership’s Board of Directors and Implementation Team, is helping align the professional development efforts of the Partnership to PI 34, the state’s three-tier teacher licensing system that took effect last year.

Team looks at PI 34
The Partnership’s Board of Directors – which includes a variety of community groups including the Zoo, the library system and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Black School Educators – serves as a liaison of sorts between the Partnership and the constituents of the various groups. But, Anderson said, the workhorse of the Partnership is the Implementation Team.

The team includes representatives from the various partner organizations. Its role is to develop plans to put in place MPA’s programs – all aimed at making sure MPS students read, write and perform math at or above grade level.

The team meets biweekly and has divided into four work groups devoted to priorities that include family literacy and tutoring, research, teacher and principal quality, as well as PI 34.

“Part of the problem is PI 34 has been an unfunded mandate,” Lehmann said. “We have spent almost a year now developing a model of what a high performance classroom should look like. We’re about ready to roll it out. It has had the input of teachers across the district, and from that is the connect to PI 34.”

He said the discussions go on, and it remains a struggle. “We don’t have all the answers, and I don’t believe DPI has all the answers on PI 34.”

Lehmann said he understands how a new teacher can be overwhelmed by the licensing law and the demands of the career and the district.

“That’s the beauty of the learning team,” he said. “The learning team can very quickly bring support to young teachers.”

Making it permanent?
While it was billed as a seven-year project, Lehmann said the Partnership truly “is the future of this community.” He cited the fact the Partnership has withstood the departure and replacement of two of its founders – Zimpher and Korte – as proof of the commitment to the public-private partnership.

“This really is a cultural shift, not just within the school district, but across the community,” he said.
Anderson said creation of the Partnership came down to one simple realization by all parties:

“We all realized that we all had responsibility in what was happening in the public schools and we all had to be part of the solution.

“And that sounds simplistic. But it came down to what is in the best interest of the city of Milwaukee.

“And what’s in the best interest of the city of Milwaukee is to have a vibrant public education system.”

Posted May 13, 2005