NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Good Friends in Several Successful Partnerships
By Ernesto Schiefelbein, Alberto Hurtado University, Santiago
Email: mcgrossi@mi.clKeywords
Partnership, Education, Chile
Summary
Ernesto Schiefelbein recounts his partnership experiences in this article and identifies some common elements to all the experiences.
Serendipity seemed to generate each of my partnership experiences, but long term joint efforts eventually developed and some common elements to all experiences could be identified. By sheer luck in my university studies in Chile I had several foreign professors that forced me and my classmates to use relevant theory to analyze practice. E. Paternost (Italy), E Cansado (Spain), J. Grunwald (USA) and R. Vekemans (Belgium) asked their students to read relevant research, look at real life problems, data and processes in order to understand them. That was a method rather different than the usual rote-learning prevailing in Latin America.
Therefore, in 1962, when Russell Davis from Harvard came to my office in the Development Corporation (CORFO) looking for studies on human resources we showed him our findings, and asked him for references and advice that helped our team to leap forward in the analysis of Chilean manpower problems. Later on Russell prepared a brilliant report on the economic demand for better educated workers and invited me to keep working in educational development and planning in his doctoral program in the CSED at Harvard.
Four years later I arrived in Cambridge, Mass. with lots of data and the problem I was facing in my new job: how to optimize the budget allocation to the different levels of the education system. Russell patiently showed me the relevant available models, discussed alternative approaches, and was instrumental in the design of a 700-equations model and in the debugging of puzzling results in daily printouts from the computer center. Eventually a practical simulation model was available for the Chilean planning process and later on the model was widely used in many other countries. The model proved that principals were reporting only half of the real number of repeaters generating the so called Type III Error for solving the wrong problem. A complex reform was implemented in Chile and in 1968 a national testing system started to measure achievement at the end of grade 8 to eventually evaluate the impact of such reform.
The evaluation of the 1965-1970 reform proved to be a major challenge and we looked for help. Good luck struck us when Joe Farrell accepted to become an ?associated researcher? in the evaluation study and brought all the experience gathered in the preparation of the Coleman Report. He arrived in early 1970 and kept working with us in the analysis of factors associated with achievement for the next two decades and in many other projects later on. We were also lucky when we followed Arnold Anderson?s suggestion to collect data on ?students? textbook availability? that eventually was the alterable variable that better explained the variance in individual students? scores. Mats Hultin read a draft of our report and convinced his World Bank colleagues to start lending money for distributing free textbooks in developing countries.
In 1971 the challenge was to finance a center targeted on education public polices and this time Noel McGinn, also from Harvard, brought the expertise and academic weight that convinced the Ford Foundation to give a generous grant to PIIE. Furthermore, he modeled the role of ?applied researcher?, leading teams that looked for the n-achievement levels of textbooks, education topics discussed in the press or planning processes carried out during the 1965-1970 reform process. The 2-hour weekly staff meeting allowed the sharing of his impressive academic knowledge with the whole team. After his departure Noel continued advising members of the team for the next almost 40 years; analyzing the magnitude of repetition and its causes; preparing columns for local newspapers; improving teaching in a private university, or discussing issues on planning and research. We systematized some of the lessons from such a process in a book now being published by IBE-UNESCO.
In the mid-1970s I had the opportunity to systematically exchange research findings and experiences with all members of the Research Review and Advisory Group (RRAG) that Bob Myers created to encourage the diffusion of relevant knowledge on education and the design and implementation of key research. For example, the project sponsored the review of ?education production function? studies. With John Simmons we summarized what had been learned in those studies and concluded that it was now the time to carry out experimental studies to isolate the effects of specific strategies. In fact writing this current text about what we learned in our partnership processes is a delayed consequence of the exchanges started by Bob and what I learned from his brilliant work as ?networker?.
A partnership developed with Larry Wolff in the early 1990s while preparing several World Bank reports on the state of education in Latin America coupled with the need for accurate comparisons between alternative strategies detected in 1994 when I was Minister of Education in Chile involved us in the design of a Delphi study on cost-effectiveness of 40 strategies for primary education in Latin America. This approach provided a way to share subjective knowledge about impacts and implementation problems. For example, this study offered (for the first time) the specific suggestion to allocate the best reading teacher to grade one. We have finished a similar study for Anglophone Africa, are working on a new study for initial educational development in Chile, and probably we will keep replicating the approach in other regions.
There are other ongoing relevant international partnerships that should eventually provide further insights on these collaborative processes. With Winfried Böhm on the training of teachers on the analysis of their practice; with Karl-Heinz Flechsig on models available for teaching and learning or with Luis Crouch on early evaluation of reading. In other opportunities I benefited from all her learning as in the case of working with Mary Jean Bowman in the analysis of the political economy of public support of higher education. There have also been partnerships with national colleagues (Patricio Cariola, Mario Leyton, Gabriel Castillo and Luis Naranjo) or Latin American colleagues (Juan Carlos Tedesco, Bernardo Toro, Claudio de Moura Castro or Luis Muñoz) that have some different characteristics.
All these processes seemed to occur with partners having somewhat different, but complementary, strengths as well as a common ?permanent? interest in the topic. The joint effort enhanced human intellectual competences (bringing concrete benefits to the partners), suggested ways to reorganize the use of resources or brought about new products.
In summary, I have been lucky to participate in successful partnerships that eventually enabled the solution of relevant educational problems or created new ways to think about old problems; it was a process of continuously learning and developing professionally, and it also made me great long-term friends.
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