| 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 |