Beyond the Principal: How External Partnerships Are Managed in Urban Schools

Purpose At urban schools, external organizations can provide supplemental academic programs and social services. Managing these relationships is necessary but adds to the burden on school leaders. In this paper, we analyze how the management of external relationships is distributed among school leaders, teachers, and staff. Methods Our method is a comparative study of nine urban schools and their external networks. The schools are from one US city and vary by type (public, charter, Catholic) and neighborhood (by nonprofit density). We collect network survey data from school staff (N = 223) to analyze their involvement with and awareness of external organizations providing academic or social services. Findings First, schools maintain external relationships by dividing up their management, either by design or default. Managing external organizational relations at all schools was primarily an individual, rather than a collective, endeavor—and this was truer for external relationships involving academic programs than those providing social services. Second, network involvement varied across school leadership teams: some were directly involved as relationship managers, but others were observers or laissez-faire while teachers and staff managed. At three schools, the leadership team was more involved with social service providers than academic program providers. Implications Documenting this decentralized network structure reveals significant hidden labor that is obscured both by its conception as "extra" work and by the fact that it is fragmented across numerous individual staff members. Further, limited leadership involvement raises critical questions about how schools ensure these diverse external resources contribute to a coherent school program.