Partners or managers: Introducing the Continuum of Control, by Catherine DiMartino

The past five years have witnessed the near reinvention of many urban districts, as private-sector providers extend their influence into public education.  This phenomenon has been felt most acutely in urban centers where policy makers have historically struggled to improve low-performing schools. Cities like Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York have become vanguards for this latest approach to reform. In these cities, private-sector organizations such as educational management organizations, charter management organizations, and, most recently, partner support organizations have gained an increasingly greater foothold by partnering with districts or individual schools outright.

My article offers a new framework, entitled the “continuum of control,” to capture the landscape of power and control across the organizational types facilitated by the portfolio management model—ranging from schools partnered with private-sector organizations to those run outright by them. I hypothesize that by accounting for context and the characteristics of key actors, the continuum of control can act as a predictive tool to organize, categorize, and understand the distribution of power and control across organizations and the implications of this distribution for the empowerment of key educational stakeholders.

The continuum of control contains three categories that private-sector organizations working with public schools can fall into and between: affiliation, thin management, and comprehensive management.  Affiliation organizations are partners in the basic sense of the word, holding the least amount of control and often not actively seeking greater influence. Thin managers, in contrast, practice a greater degree of control, often carrying a set school model that they would like to see implemented by the partner school. However, thin managers face the challenge of having to use soft “influencing” skills as best they can to advocate for their ideas to be adopted, given that they do not hold ultimate authority over key questions such as personnel and budget. Finally, comprehensive managers have the most direct influence over all aspects of decision making. In effect, they manage the schools they are partnered with and are accountable for the schools’ outcomes.

The policy environment in New York State and New York City has been very hospitable toward private-sector players in public education.  The recent 2014 State budget gave charter schools additional funding per pupil as well as required the City to provide them with space.  Additionally former Mayor Michael Bloomberg embraced the concept of creating a “portfolio of schools,” modeled after the investment portfolios of the corporate world.  Under his tenure, the City opened over 350 new, small schools (Foley 2010).

Findings revealed the importance of informal and formal agreements, district oversight and accountability, and transparency.  The presence of formal agreements clarifies stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities. Clarity over issues of ownership, personnel, budgeting, outcomes, and termination are essential for successful relationships (Behn and Kant 1999; Hill et al. 2009). For example, if one of the partner organizations in my study made it clear from the beginning of the relationship that it wanted a role in personnel decisions and decision-making power over the budget, it would have signaled to teachers and the principals that this provider, in fact, wanted to be a manager rather than a partner. It is also incumbent upon the district or principal—those who negotiate the contract—to inform key stakeholders, i.e. administrators, teachers, students, and parents, who are all affected by the new relationship.  My findings revealed that parents and teachers had either poor or nonexistent understandings of the relationship between the school and the partner support organization.

Further, findings revealed that the public representative—whether the district or principal—must have the capacity to negotiate, manage relationships with, and evaluate provider partnerships.  Without this authority, there is no way to hold accountable both public and private sector actors for their actions.  Additionally, a third party entity needs to exist to which both parties – the school and partner – can turn to for mediation.  Such assistance becomes crucial, especially when partnerships sour and one entity seeks to exit the relationship.

The ambiguity mentioned above occurs for numerous reasons. Some of this haziness exists because partners and schools do not clarify their roles and responsibilities in contracts prior to collaboration. Some exists because members of organizations and school personnel tend to be inexperienced in both forming and sustaining these relationships. Finally, some exists because of the policy pressure to quickly scale up, which has sometimes impelled providers to develop their school design models as a work in process over time, in order to ensure fidelity to their organization’s vision and, from their perspective, best ensure the development of high-quality schools.

The addition of private-sector providers alters public education, as new players bring their own organizational goals and visions to school communities.

The addition of private-sector providers alters public education, as new players bring their own organizational goals and visions to school communities. While clear benefits to partnership exist—for example, access to additional resources and networks–recent scholarship also highlights the challenges of these relationships. Findings from those studies, including this one, reveal that principals often feel as though the private-sector partner has become a new, second boss, while teachers and parents express a loss of voice in school level decision making (Bulkley et al. 2004; Scott 2012). Most of these challenges revolve around the question of who ultimately controls the school: the principal, district, or private-sector partner? The continuum facilitates clarification of a potential partner’s goals and visions for school reform (Do partners intend to scale up, locally or nationally?), delineation of roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders (Who hires staff ?), analysis of funding parameters (How does the partner make money now? How will it sustain itself in the future?), and contextualization of the key variables that will impact the collaboration (Are teachers unionized?).

The diverse landscape of educational providers, the confusion surrounding roles and relationships of all actors, and the fluid nature of local contexts all make public-private partnerships challenging, necessitating an analytical framework to facilitate more transparent and, ultimately, productive relationships. The continuum of control provides this framework: it is a tool that can be leveraged to assess the pros and cons of potential and ongoing collaboration.

In some cases, the exercise of placing an organization along the continuum could further improve a generally effective partnership by shedding light on areas of ambiguity and potential disagreement. In other cases, knowing where along the continuum an organization falls could avoid a difficult partnership in the first place, heading off a struggle for control that ultimately makes for a difficult school environment.  Financial support from both the federal government and foundations, coupled with the reality of cash-strapped districts, increases the attractiveness of using private sector actors to manage schools. This reality speaks to the relevance and value of the continuum of control for both providers and school communities. Any public-private partnership has the potential to develop a strong, effective public school. This is much more likely if the partnership is entered into as the result of transparent, fully informed decision making.