Joint Ventures: An Experiment in Community/Professional Co-framing in K-12 Education

Mar 17, 2014
  • Description

This is a collaborative report between both the Kettering Foundation and Public Agenda. What happens when local school leaders sit down to talk with teachers, parents, and other members of the community about the ends and means of local education? Can people bringing different perspectives and experiences to the issue agree on top goals for their communities? Can they settle on needed changes and decide what signifies genuine progress? To find out, we brought together parents, teachers, school administrators, businesspeople, community organization representatives and nonparent taxpayers in four cities across the U.S. These groups talked about improving education and learning in their community. We call this process "co-framing." The ultimate objective of co-framing is for districts and communities to work together to set goals, identify solutions and assess progress in education. In many respects, the results of this project are enormously encouraging. In others, they suggest barriers that will require additional examination and raise questions for future experimentation and research.