Unlocking the Black Box of School–Industry Partnerships: A Comparative Case Study

ABSTRACT Many schools are creating and expanding their work‐based learning (WBL) offerings to provide students access to meaningful adult–youth interactions during high school in response to increased policy focus on career readiness. Strong WBL systems depend on the success of school–industry partnerships, which, historically, have been difficult to create and sustain. This study investigates three telling cases (urban, rural and suburban) that transformed student learning experiences through industry partnerships. The analytic framework of systems dynamics makes visible the complex cross‐sector interactions that enable each case. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and publicly available data (e.g., news reports and sociodemographic data). The interviews were coded to (1) identify the elements and connections in each system and (2) distil common design features between the three systems. The systems have four common design features: explicit trust‐building, signalling institutional credibility, (striving for) robust systems and aligning instructional systems with industry needs. The findings demonstrate how very different schools enacted principles from the educational change literature to overcome documented barriers to collaboration. Retaining the complexity of educational contexts was essential to better understand the essential elements in each case. Furthermore, the common design principles can be useful to school and community leaders to design and refine local systems. Future research can build on this exploratory work to investigate the complexity of school–industry partnership designs and how they impact student outcomes over time.