Issues in Establishing and Developing an Educational Collaboration
The Yale-New Haven Experience
by James R. Vivian
Contents:
- Introduction
- The New Haven Setting
- Conditions for Beginning
- Assessing Needs and Resources Defining Boundaries
- Determining Aims, Activities, and Schedule, and Inventing Terminology
- Devising Structure and Assigning Responsiblities
- Approaching and Conducting Evaluation
- Continuing the Partnership: The University Perspective
- References
Published Essays and Testimony | Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
Participants in the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and I have had the opportunity elsewhere to describe the concept, operation, and some of the results of our program (see Vivian, 1985a, 1985b, 1986). We have spoken about the four principles that have guided the program since its inception: 1) our belief in the fundamental importance of teaching to learning in schools and our emphasis on the classroom application of our collaborative work; 2) our insistence that teachers of students at different levels interact as colleagues addressing the common problems of teaching their disciplines; 3) our conviction that teacher leadership is indispensable to educational reform; and 4) our certainty that collaborative programs will be truly effective only if they are long-term. University and school teachers in the Institute have written about what they have gained from the program. We also have presented the results of preliminary evaluations of the Institute, which indicate that the program has increased teachers' knowledge of their disciplines, heightened their expectations of their students ability to learn, raised their morale, and encouraged them to remain in teaching in our local public schools, and that this, in turn, has improved student learning.
For several years we have been discussing our program with colleagues in other institutions who have been pursuing the establishment of similar programs to benefit mutually the schools and universities in their own communities. During the course of those conversations, I have usually found ready agreement to the tenets of our approach; discussion turns quickly to how over time we have put these principles into practice in New Haven. On occasion, however, I still encounter some of the skepticism that was particularly evident when we started the Institute. Why, some ask incredulously, would faculty members at an institution like Yale be interested in participating in such a program, and, even if they were, what could they offer to teachers whose students are different from Yale students in so many respects? Moreover, these skeptics ask, why would Yale as an institution make a commitment to such a program? In fact, some have contended that Yale is the least likely of places for such a program to take root and thrive. Others, ironically, now take the opposite view: Only an institution with the resources of a place like Yale could possibly conduct such a program.
The present essay affords me an opportunity to speak more practically and anecdotally about how in 1977 we planned the Teachers Institute and since then have developed our program. In reflecting on the past nine years I draw on conversations with colleagues from other communities. I address some, though certainly not all, of the issues that are often raised by individuals who are considering how they might adapt our program to their own educational settings.
The scope of this essay does not permit me to treat fully many important issues in the initial and ongoing development of the program: for example, the Institute s complete organizational structure and its complex relationship to the existing structures of the University and the Schools, or the role that the University, the Schools, and numerous national and local corporations, foundations, and agencies have played in financing the program. I have chosen instead to focus on some of the main issues that school teachers themselves have addressed while shaping the program.
The New Haven Setting
I should comment initially on our own setting on New Haven, Yale University, and the New Haven Public Schools so that the reader can consider the bearing of local circumstances on our particular approach to collaboration. A qualification, however: during the course of our work with other communities I have become increasingly convinced that there are much greater similarities than differences in the opportunities for educational collaboration in cities across the country.In terms of the proportion of the population living below the federally established poverty line, New Haven, a city with a population of about 125,000, is the seventh poorest city in the nation (Rae, 1983, p. l). In our low income areas, 38.7 percent of residents are l8 years of age or younger. Of the students attending New Haven's public secondary schools, more than 60 percent come from families receiving public assistance. The percentage of minority students, mostly Black and Hispanic, enrolled in the New Haven Public Schools is higher than in 39 of the 46 major urban school districts surveyed recently by the National School Boards Association. At 83 percent, the rate of minority student enrollment is approximately the same as that in Chicago and higher than in Baltimore, Miami, Philadelphia, Birmingham, Cleveland, and St. Louis (National School Boards Association, 1983). Nationally, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students entering the ninth grade who do not graduate is about twice as great as the proportion of White students who do not graduate (National Coalition of Advocates for Students, 1985, p. l0). In New Haven, 45 percent of the students who enter the ninth grade do not complete high school.
The total enrollment in the New Haven Public Schools is about l7,000, with 8,200 students attending middle and high schools. While the school system is therefore "manageably sized" when compared with many of the larger school districts in the country, it nonetheless has the demographic features that will increasingly characterize urban public education in the United States.
Out of a total of l,200 teachers in the school system, about 420 teach subjects in the humanities and the sciences at the secondary level. The annual turnover of these secondary-school teachers, those potentially eligible to participate in the Institute, is less than 2 percent and is likely to remain at this comparatively low level for at least the next several years. Only 58.8 percent of these teachers in the humanities, 38.6 percent in the sciences, and 34.4 percent in mathematics majored in college or graduate school in the subjects they currently teach. A high proportion of teachers, particularly those in middle schools, majored in education.
In contrast, Yale has no school or department of education. With about 10,700 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, a full-time teaching faculty of 698 in the arts and sciences, and an endowment of more than $1.3 billion, Yale has tremendous resources for an institution its size. Yale faculty are leading scholars in their fields, and Yale students are among the best prepared in the country. Turnover of tenured faculty is low. Among the 5,250 undergraduates, 55 percent attended public schools; 17 percent are minority students; 82.5 percent graduate within four years of matriculation. Only 24 current undergraduates are from New Haven. As Ernest L. Boyer, former U.S. Commissioner of Education and current President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, wrote in his evaluation of the Institute, It s no secret that the University and New Haven are two separate worlds. The challenge is to find a way for these worlds to meet (198l, p. 5). To put the matter in general terms, the question in New Haven was how a major cultural institution located in the center of an urban area might become more constructively involved in the community where it resides, and upon which it depends.
Conditions for Beginning
A recognition and articulation of mutual self-interest was, of course, a necessary first step in establishing the Institute. The role of altruism, of a sense of civic and social purpose, should not be underestimated, however. Discussions proceeded simultaneously within two groups, the teachers of the University and the Schools and their administrations. That school teachers be centrally involved from the outset in shaping the program was fundamentally important if the Institute was to address how we might strengthen teaching and learning in the classroom. We wanted to empower teachers within the Institute so that through the program they might gain greater control over the subjects they teach, the curriculum they use, and the professional activities they undertake as educators. For these reasons, it was essential that participation in the program we were planning be voluntary. Just as teachers themselves would determine much of the nature of the program, teachers would decide whether they wished to take part in it.There was a coincidence of several favorable circumstances. Since 1969 teachers from New Haven secondary schools had worked with members of the Yale History Department to develop new teaching materials in American history, world area studies, and urban history. Although involving fewer than twenty teachers each year, the History Education Project (HEP), forerunner of the present Institute, enjoyed a good reputation among school teachers and with the administrations of the University and the Schools. In 1977 the Secretary of the University, who had responsibility for Yale s community relations, called HEP "the most solid, the most vital" educational link between Yale and New Haven. It provided, in fact, one of the few opportunities for the administrations to meet about a joint undertaking. HEP had been begun with a grant from the American Historical Association (AHA), which until 1973 funded a number of projects across the country concerned with improving the teaching of history in schools. The New Haven project was continued with local and state support. By 1977 the project was the only one the AHA had helped establish that was still in existence, its $l0,000 annual budget provided in equal shares by the University, the Schools, and our community foundation. This was an example of how, when there is a financial commitment of the institutions involved when a program is in the budget it receives attention and is taken seriously. There was, thus, an eight-year record of a well-regarded relationship among university and school teachers to which both institutions had a financial commitment, albeit small.
Perhaps most important, the participating school teachers and members of the Yale History Department had discovered what they stood to gain from working with each other. They became the nucleus of the groups that planned the present Institute. They were persuasive, within the University and the Schools, in enlisting administrative support. They also solicited the interest and gained the support of their colleagues in their own and other university and school departments. Because of their previous collaborative experience, they were credible in convincing their administrations and their teaching colleagues that such an undertaking would be worthwhile and mutually advantageous.
At the risk of making the Institute's history appear merely serendipitous, I should mention three additional points. A. Bartlett Giamatti, who had planned to lead the Institute s first seminar in student writing, became, in 1978, Yale's President; Howard R. Lamar, who as Chairman of the History Department had been particularly instrumental in HEP and its evolution into the Institute, became the Dean of Yale College; and Keith S. Thomson, who assisted with the Institute's later expansion into the sciences, became the Dean of the Yale Graduate School. Also, the Institute has been developed since 1978 at a time of unusual harmony and good will between the University and the Public Schools and the City administration. Moreover, the Institute was begun well before the widespread public attention that since 1983 has been paid to our nation s public schools. Far from being subjected to intense scrutiny before we could begin to have evidence of the results of the program, our problem in the early years was in obtaining any public recognition at all for teachers work in the Institute.
These are among the reasons why I often observe to colleagues from other institutions that successful collaborative projects may well begin small, investing real authority in teacher leadership and developing organically, based on the needs that teachers identify. In this way, programs are not guided by preconceptions but grow from their own local conditions. Clear and visible support from the highest levels of university and school administrations is also critical, particularly if the collaboration is to be long-term. Tangible evidence of that commitment is essential.
Surveying Needs and Resources: Defining Boundaries
For the administrations of Yale and the Schools, the first questions focused on which of the Schools' many needs might be most usefully addressed by the University's resources. In what areas did the Schools have significant needs and the University complementary strengths? What was central enough to the mission of both institutions to enable us to construct a real partnership of allies in league to improve our community s public schools? Which problems of the Schools were recurring, and which University resources enduring, so that the program might be of benefit to the Schools over the longer term? These questions were addressed at a time of enormous pressures on the budgets of Yale, the City, and the Schools. Even in better times, financial resources would never fully match our ambition to construct a highly productive partnership. In sum, the overriding question was how we might together apply limited resources in an intensive way where the need was greatest.We explored these questions in the context of developing a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to expand the history project, to include additional disciplines in the humanities, to increase the number of teachers involved, and to make the new program more demanding. The NEH did not fund that initial proposal, but since 1978 has provided strong and continuing support for the Institute. The development of proposals to NEH and others has demonstrated that proposal writing itself has certain immediately beneficial results: it creates a need to clarify and articulate objectives, and it imposes a timetable and deadline for reaching decisions.
Teachers and administrators from the University and the Schools quickly reached a consensus: The relationship between the University and the Schools must be both prominent and permanent within any viable larger relationship between Yale and New Haven, and, of the many ways Yale might aid New Haven, none is more logical than a program that shares Yale s educational resources with the Schools. Because of changing student needs, changing scholarship, and changing educational objectives set by the school system and each level of government, school curricula undergo constant revision. Because of Yale s strength in the academic disciplines, all agreed that developing curricula, further preparing teachers in the subjects they teach, and assisting teachers to keep abreast of changes in their fields are the ways that Yale can most readily assist the Schools.
The intent was not to create new resources at Yale; rather, it was to make available in a planned way Yale's existing strength that is, to expand and to institutionalize the work of university faculty members with their colleagues in the Schools. Even at this early stage, both Yale and the Schools sought a course of action that might have a substantial impact. The Teachers Institute was established, then, in 1978, as a joint program of Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools designed to strengthen teaching and thereby to improve student learning in our community's middle and high schools. That year, the President of Yale, the Superintendent of Schools, the Mayor of New Haven, and the Institute Director held a news conference on the program. This was the first news conference held by the President and the Mayor in over a decade, and the only one in memory that had been held jointly by the President and the Superintendent of Schools. Mayor Frank Logue commented that the Institute represents "a combined activity that is in the mainstream of both our enterprises," not something made "out of whole cloth."
The Teachers Institute has since become by far the most comprehensive, intensive, and sustained collaboration of Yale faculty members with public school teachers. Between 1978 and 1986 the Institute has offered 57 different seminars in the humanities and arts, the social sciences, mathematics, and the physical and life sciences. The Institute has been fortunate in the number of distinguished Yale faculty members who have become involved in the program; 56 Yale faculty members, many of them among the most senior members of their departments, have given Institute talks and led one or more seminars. Between 1978 and 1986, 229 teachers completed the program successfully from one to nine times. Through the program, Fellows have developed 463 individual curriculum units which are widely taught in school courses. Much, however, remains to be done. Two-thirds of New Haven secondary-school teachers in the humanities and the sciences have never participated in the program; of those who have taken part, two-thirds have participated only once or twice. This is especially important because evaluations have shown that teachers who participate in the Institute on a recurring basis, who make the program a regular part of their professional lives, gain the most.
Still, one of the most persistent issues for the Institute is keeping our work sharply focused where the need is compelling, where we have annually renewable resources to address that need, and where successfully addressing that need is demonstrably in the self-interest of both the University and the Schools. We periodically resurvey the boundaries we fixed in 1978. To give some sense of both the centrifugal pressures and our limitations, I mention four examples. They illustrate some of the reasons why we have retained the Institute s original focus on assisting teachers of the humanities and the sciences in New Haven s public secondary schools.
First, some have suggested that Yale should, either instead of or in addition to the Institute, work directly with school students, perhaps with the most academically capable who themselves might later enter Yale. Supplementary programs such as the national Upward Bound program have demonstrated the ways in which university and school teachers can work together effectively in such programs for students "at risk," and the high rates at which these students can enter and graduate from college. At present, in fact, hundreds of Yale faculty members, staff, and students are active, mostly on a volunteer basis, in a score of supplementary programs for students from New Haven and other area schools. I stress the value of such programs, while at the same time distinguishing them from what the Institute represents.
Through the Institute we have chosen to affirm the respective missions of the University and the Schools in terms of the students each enrolls, and to attend to something intrinsic to teaching and learning in schools. We have decided against having teachers from the University and the Schools change place. Also and this is hard to say judiciously it has sometimes seemed not only presumptuous, but also potentially demeaning of school teachers, to seek to replace rather than to assist them in teaching their own students. Most of all, we have wanted to achieve the greatest impact with available financial resources and with the limited number of faculty members who in any particular year might be involved. For example, the same budget might support a given number of faculty members working intensively either with 80 students, or with 80 teachers and through them the several thousand students in their present classes, not to mention the students in their future classes.
Second, some have urged that we also involve elementary school teachers. Our focus on secondary school teachers arises from the fact that they specialize in one or two academic disciplines. This provides the common ground for their work with university faculty members. That we have chosen not to involve elementary school teachers underscores the centrality of subject matter to our collaboration.
Third, some have wanted us to expand the geographic boundaries of the Institute to encompass at a minimum the schools in neighboring communities, schools which many university faculty members' children attend. Others would recommend a perimeter that is statewide, regional, or national, more corresponding to the geographic range from which Yale draws its own students. Here again we admit our limitations in terms of faculty and finance, and are convinced also that in attempting too much we would dilute what can be accomplished by concentrating on the schools in our own community. In addition, if we were to expand the program s geography very far, we would have to alter its schedule, making it a summer and weekend program for only a few teachers, at most, from any given school. As described below, we believe that the present year-round schedule has distinct advantages, and that the program s impact on particular schools is directly related to the proportion of their teachers we can involve.
Fourth, there are the pressures for evaluation and national dissemination of the program, both of which we accept as important responsibilities, but neither of which will we allow to detract from our central purpose of assisting teachers in our community's secondary schools. I return below to some of the numerous issues surrounding evaluation of the Institute.
In short, we try to keep in mind that truisms are among other things true, and that school reform efforts are often too ambitious, not to mention ephemeral. As Theodore R. Sizer, Chairman of the Study of High Schools and of the Education Department of Brown University, wrote in his evaluation of our program,"The claims for increased scale for the Institute are not persuasive. Indeed, the arguments for the current scale are powerful. All too few school reform efforts get the scale right. By remaining small, focused and uncomplicated, the Institute will serve its purpose admirably" (1983, p. 3).
Determining Aims, Activities, and Schedule, and Inventing Terminology
From the beginning, the teachers in the leadership of the Institute have been adamant about making the program academically serious, demanding of participants, attractive to a significant proportion of their colleagues, and directed at improving the learning of all New Haven middle and high school students. We therefore had to determine the activities that would best assist teachers not only in studying a subject, but also in developing practical approaches for applying their new learning in diverse school courses. We had to arrive at a schedule that would be manageable for the largest number of teachers, a schedule that also would be possible for the university faculty members whom we wished to involve. To make the program as demanding as feasible, and still to achieve a high level of participation by New Haven teachers, we had to consider questions of time and money and other rewards how to balance the rigor of the program with sufficient incentives that we might realistically make available to participating teachers.Most of all, I think, teachers wanted to make the Institute something that would be both professionally and personally important, in terms of their own intellectual rejuvenation and growth and their capacity and effectiveness as teachers. I recall two themes, in particular, from the earliest conversations: that many of the courses in their preservice preparation had done little to prepare them for the realities of the classroom, and that many of the curriculum development projects and in- service opportunities in which they had been engaged since entering teaching had been insubstantial and ineffective. To people who talk with teachers, I suspect these are familiar themes. Teachers spoke of not wanting to invest a lot of time and effort in yet another short-term project that would have little or no bearing on their own or other teachers' classrooms. They were, that is, seasoned but still sanguine and dedicated, despite past experience. This was reflected in many long, at times emotional, planning sessions.
From the outset we have reached decisions mainly by developing a consensus. We have thought that the reservations or questions of even one teacher in the program s leadership must be taken seriously and addressed. In meetings, although we have taken countless straw polls, the majority almost never overrules the strong objections of anyone attending. This has proved an effective procedure for airing and hammering out solutions to the many real issues in undertaking such a program and for giving teachers a proprietary interest in it. In this way the teacher leaders developed the conviction and the enthusiasm that they later passed along to many of their colleagues. In the course of their discussions, teachers often had to suspend judgment, to set aside stereotypes and myths about schools and universities, to explore the assumptions and values that might come to be shared across the university and school cultures described incisively by Seymour Sarason (197l). Finally, through these discussions we had to adopt terminology that would reflect their innovative intentions.
Though many of the above issues will never be firmly or finally resolved, I will describe something about how we have dealt with each thus far. It seemed clear from the outset that, to make the program academically serious, participating teachers should not passively receive knowledge but actively engage in its pursuit. In short, everyone would have to come prepared to discuss a subject and how to introduce it in their own teaching. And everyone would have to come regularly. Teachers' working together in small groups seemed the format most conducive to this kind of exchange, and most likely to challenge and to involve each individual participant. We decided to call these groups seminars to distinguish them from regular courses, a term banned from the Institute vocabulary because it connotes a hierarchical, student-teacher relationship. University faculty members we therefore described simply by their function in the program as seminar leaders. Participating teachers we decided to call Fellows, suggesting their affiliation with the institution as colleagues, not as students.
The specific terms we chose are less important than to note the terms we were avoiding. We needed to develop a vocabulary that would convey that teachers from the University and teachers from the Schools were participating on a par as colleagues in the same disciplines and within the same profession. We stressed that both brought to the enterprise something equally valuable to our overall aim of strengthening teaching and learning in schools. With respect to achieving that aim, the expertise of university faculty members, as we conceived it, lies especially in their knowledge of academic subjects, while school teachers expertise lies especially in their pedagogical experience, their sense of what will work for students in their classrooms. Though this distinction is obviously somewhat arbitrary and artificial, it has served to highlight the respective strengths and the principal contributions of university faculty members and school teachers within the context of the program, and to assign coequal importance to their participation. I will not enter here the longstanding debate about whether subject matter and pedagogy can or should be divorced, but will only observe that the formulation we devised has enabled participants to pursue both simultaneously, has proved essential to the collegiality on which our program is founded, and has become central to the program s approach.
Teachers decided that the annual program should also include a series of informal talks by University faculty members. These would acquaint teachers with faculty members who might later lead seminars on the subjects of their talks. The talks would provide intellectual stimulation and would point up interdisciplinary relationships in scholarship and teaching; they would set a tone for the program. By bringing together Fellows from all of the seminars, they would give the program coherence and participants a sense of collective purpose. By placing the talks at the beginning of the program we might ascertain, in advance of the seminars' weekly meetings, which teachers were definitely committed to participating fully in the program. The talks continue to serve these purposes, and the teachers in the leadership of the program are determined to retain them. Nonetheless, the talks are a matter of controversy each year, and the controversy surrounding them is instructive. Many teachers would prefer the Institute to schedule more seminar meetings instead, because in these they are more actively engaged in studying a subject that is immediately applicable in their own teaching.
The interdisciplinary nature of the talks reflects teachers larger desire that Institute activities cut across conventional barriers between departments, disciplines, schools, and levels that the Institute be a means for overcoming both institutional balkanization and the personal and professional isolation that, especially in the earlier years of the Institute, teachers so frequently said they felt. The subjects of Institute seminars also have combined disciplines in diverse ways, joining, for example, the study of history with the study of literature, literature with art, art with history, history with geology, and science with mathematics. Middle school, high school, and university teachers work together in these seminars. Teachers from several school departments often take part in a particular seminar. To give two examples: teachers of English, foreign language, and bilingual education have participated in seminars on a particular literary genre such as poetry, drama, or the short story; teachers of math, history, and art have worked together in seminars on architecture. The Institute is thus both an interschool and an interdisciplinary forum where teachers work with one another and with university faculty members. This has had, further, the practical advantage of increasing the pool of teachers from which to constitute a seminar group. It also has increased the adaptability of the materials teachers prepare in the program for use in a range of school courses and at different levels.
To emphasize the classroom application of participants reading and discussion of their reading in the seminars, we decided that each teacher would write a "curriculum unit," taking a manageable topic within the seminar subject and developing it for classroom use. Each seminar must face the challenge of balancing the teachers' further preparation in the seminar subject with their development of teaching materials for the classroom. In this way, each seminar addresses the central educational issue of the connection between the teacher's preparation and students' learning. Based on our experience with HEP, this was something too vital to be left to chance. We remain convinced that we cannot simply assume that the teacher's new knowledge will be effectively conveyed to students. By requiring the writing of a curriculum unit, we insist that teachers think deliberately and formally about how what they are learning can be applied in their own teaching.
Fellows prepare their curriculum units in a five-step process, beginning with a provisional statement of their unit topic on their application to the program, and continuing throughout the seminar period with a prospectus, two drafts, and the final writing of the unit. This process allows a gradual development and enlargement as Fellows think and rethink their units, and provides for various drafts so that the Fellows and the seminar leader in each seminar can comment on and contribute to the work-in-progress (see Vivian, 1986, pp. l8-19).
What Fellows write, then, is not "curriculum" in the usual sense. They are not developing overall content and skill objectives for each course and grade level, nor are they preparing day-by day lesson plans for their courses. Institute units also differ from traditional curricula in form; they are not composed mainly of lists and outlines of topics to be covered. Rather, teachers research a topic within the seminar subject and write an essay on that topic and approaches for introducing it in their teaching. We stress the teacher s own mastery of the topic together with strategies for teaching it to students.
How we might ensure that the materials teachers write are actually introduced into their own teaching was a basic issue. Also, we did not want the Institute to be something concocted by Yale and imposed on the Schools. For both reasons, the teachers planning the Institute decided that the seminars should be organized around topics that teachers themselves had requested, topics on which teachers wanted to work because they perceived a need to prepare these topics for their own teaching. In this way, they thought, the introduction of the work of the seminars into New Haven classrooms would be self-fulfilling. Our experience has borne this out. As a result, we sometimes ask university faculty members to lead a collegiality with which everyone in the seminar pursues the subject together.
I come last to the question of scheduling, in part because we placed it last during our initial planning. We realized that if we placed it first, we might not get beyond it. We did not want practical questions of scheduling to dictate what the program would be; we wanted first to determine what ideally the program should be, and then to consider how we might make it possible for teachers and Yale faculty members to participate. Our primary aims in scheduling were twofold: to make the program as rigorous as possible and still to achieve the highest possible level of participation by New Haven teachers. We knew that if we made it so time-consuming that we could meet in a phone booth, the program would have no influence on schools. The Institute s impact would be roughly proportional to the number of teachers participating on a recurring basis; that seemed only common sense. On the other hand, to have a large number of teachers participating in something insubstantial would also be ineffectual. We spent a lot of time on the schedule, and we still do. It is possible to comment here on only a few points from these discussions that annually test the patience of everyone involved.
We quickly decided that the program should not be conducted on a daily, summer schedule. From our experience with HEP, we knew that we could not attract a high proportion of teachers if we presented them with a choice between the Institute and their needs for summer employment and choice between the Institute and their needs for summer employment and time with their families. We also knew from experience that the teachers who would be able to participate on that basis would not be a cross section of New Haven teachers, and we were determined that Institute Fellows be as numerous and as representative of all New Haven teachers as possible, because the education of New Haven students depends upon all their teachers, not just a select few. In the end, we decided to schedule talks and seminars in weekly meetings of two hours on the same day each week, so that people could plan ahead and so that we could work more easily with school administrators to avoid scheduling conflicts. Tuesday has become the Institute meeting day, and this is widely known by teachers who have participated or who are considering participation. In 1978 these weekly meetings were held over three months; they now span from mid-March until late July, overlapping the school year in New Haven by more than three months. By lengthening the program we elongated the period during which Fellows read in the seminar subject. We also were able to add steps in the process of writing the curriculum unit, described above.
That so much of the program occurs during the school year we regard as a distinct advantage. Fellows are not participating in an isolated experience that is removed from the realities of the classroom. Instead, they come to talks and seminars after a day of teaching and return to their classes the following morning. In this way they can begin to try out in their own classes some of the materials and approaches that they eventually will include in their curriculum units.
How, then, having arrived at the aims, activities, and schedule for the Institute, should we determine the incentives and rewards that would encourage maximum participation by New Haven teachers? For three reasons especially it was clear that there should be a stipend. First, we wanted to cover Fellows' expenses for books, other materials, typing, and travel without the burdensome paperwork of reimbursing them for each item. Second, the demands of the program would reduce or preclude for several months the outside income (from real estate, homebound and after-school instruction, coaching, and other sources) on which many teachers depend to support their families. Third, we wanted to underscore that teachers would participate not just for their own personal benefit but for the ways in which their participation might over time strengthen education in the schools. There were dissenting voices, some saying from the Yale side that taking seminars is what the University usually charges for, not what it ordinarily pays people to do, and some saying from the Schools side that the program would represent only what was already expected of teachers in terms of curriculum development and planning for their courses. We were nonetheless convinced that the stipend should be as generous as possible, for the reasons mentioned above and, even more importantly, because we wanted to make the program as demanding and professionally important as we could. We did not want the question of remuneration to limit participation in the Institute in the way it limits the attractiveness of the teaching profession in the first place. We also decided that the stipend would be paid only upon successful completion of the program, which means Fellows attending and coming prepared to all seminar meetings and talks, meeting all deadlines in preparing a curriculum unit consistent with Institute guidelines, and conferring at least twice individually with the seminar leader to discuss the concept and development of the unit. The teachers in the leadership of the program are firm about what we term full participation by all Fellows.
Raising the stipend, only $750 in 1986, is a perennial issue, and its comparatively low level in relation to the time the program requires suggests that few teachers participate in the Institute only for the remuneration. Annual evaluations confirm that it is the seminar experience itself which most attracts teachers to participate. Also, Fellows have the opportunity to "publish" what they write in the volume of curriculum units that the Institute compiles for each seminar; these units are distributed to all New Haven teachers who wish to use them in their teaching. Fellows who remain in good standing are for one year full members of the University community, with full library privileges and access to other campus facilities and resources, not only those organized through the Institute. We particularly sought to avoid placing Fellows in any sort of "second-class citizenship" on campus. Fellows are listed in the university directory of faculty and staff, which has symbolic meaning in recognizing them as colleagues and members of the Yale community, and practical value in opening institutional resources to them.
We also, in time, had to address the relation of teachers participation in the Institute to universities course credit policies and to the Schools in service credit policies. The latter proved to be easier to resolve quickly in that the Schools administration has usually allowed teachers to take part in an Institute-sponsored activity in lieu of attending a regularly scheduled in-service activity. In fact, Institute Fellows have presented numerous in-service workshops on their units for other teachers during the city-wide in-service program when teachers are free to choose which workshops on their units they wish to attend. Teachers in the leadership of the program have, however, declined to schedule Institute presentations for in-service activities that other teachers are required to attend. This is consistent with the voluntary nature of all Institute activities, the principle that the Institute is for teachers who have both the interest and the time to take part. It also is based on the knowledge that teachers attending a required program are often not a receptive audience.
For two years, we largely avoided addressing the issue of university credit for Institute seminars out of the concern that, if credit were associated with Institute participation, Fellows and faculty members would approach Institute seminars as courses, and that this would undermine the collegial nature of the program. Practically speaking, almost all teachers in New Haven have permanent positions with the school system, and few are pursuing an advanced degree. Of those who are, most are taking courses in education administration or in other subjects to which Institute seminars do not pertain. Nonetheless, teachers who were taking courses in academic subjects began to comment that their work in Institute seminars was much more than equivalent to work in courses they were pursuing elsewhere. After extended discussions with teachers and within the University Advisory Council on the Institute, we decided that teachers might petition for certification of their course of study upon successful completion of an Institute seminar. Because certification is an after-the-fact procedure, seminar participants do not know who may later seek course credit for their Institute participation. In this way we ensure that our certification policy does not color the seminar experience. Nonetheless, this allows teachers who are pursuing a degree to present evidence to institutions where they are enrolled that they have completed a seminar in the Institute, so that these institutions can then determine whether teachers" Institute work may be applied toward that degree.
We also wanted the Institute to be attractive to Yale faculty members who might participate as seminar leaders. Whatever the personal and professional rewards and sense of community service they derive from doing so and many who have led seminars are eloquent on these points we decided that their responsibilities to the Institute were roughly equivalent to teaching a course in the summer; they are compensated accordingly.
Some final notes on terminology: Use of the terms teacher and faculty member is nettling. Individuals who teach in schools and individuals who teach in colleges and universities are certainly both teachers, but they are not both faculty members in the same sense. The differences in the power that these two groups of teachers can exercise as faculty members in their respective institutions are real, and cannot be erased by an insistent use of language that would indicate the contrary.
With respect to collaboration, a buzz-word now used to describe widely varied activities, it should be clear that, in New Haven, we mean by the term something specific. We find it increasingly helpful to use partnership to describe a formal arrangement between institutions, and collaboration to characterize the collegial process of teachers working together. In New Haven, then, within a partnership of institutions, there is a coequal relationship of colleagues, a voluntary association of teachers who choose to work together. Equal importance is attached to what each colleague brings to the relationship.
Devising a Structure for Teacher Leadership
In order to practice collegiality in the day-to-day workings of the Institute, we devised an organizational structure that reflects the primacy of teachers. We did not wish the program to be dominated administratively by Yale, nor did we wish to create different classes of Fellows by involving New Haven school administrators in administrative roles in the Institute. At the most practical level, we hoped to use peers to solve problems of absence or lateness, in order to avoid placing the Yale faculty members in authoritarian roles. Teachers serving in leadership positions in the Institute have provided a means for solving these potential difficulties. Through them we have developed and maintained both rigorous expectations and an accommodating schedule so that there has been a high level of participation by New Haven teachers. That level of participation is attributable largely to the fact that teachers themselves promote the program in their own schools and recruit their colleagues as participants. In this capacity, no one can be more credible than a teacher who is committed to the program and who testifies from his or her own direct experience about the benefits of participation. No one from outside the school or in a position other than that of a full-time classroom teacher could be more effective in convincing teachers and administrators as well that the Institute can assist them in their own teaching and that, by extension over time, it can improve teaching and learning throughout the schools.I cannot here trace the evolution of the structure for teacher leadership over the past nine years, but will describe its present form. In each middle and high school one or two teachers represent their colleagues to assist with planning, organizing, and conducting Institute activities. Collectively the School Representatives represent every middle and high school teacher in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities. They talk about the Institute with other teachers in their school and provide them the opportunity to take part each year in planning the program. Specifically, the Representatives are responsible for maintaining frequent contact with, and soliciting the views of, all teachers in their school; promoting the use of Institute-developed curricular materials by their colleagues; encouraging teachers to participate as Fellows; and urging teachers who are not Fellows to attend all activities open to them. School Representatives must intend to continue as teachers in New Haven s public middle or high schools, and must participate as Institute Fellows.
Institute Coordinators also have an indispensable role. Like the Representatives, Coordinators must intend to continue as teachers in New Haven s public schools and must participate as Institute Fellows. Many of them are long-time Institute participants. Their major responsibilities include coordinating the activities of the School Representatives; taking overall responsibility for the recruitment and admissions process; and assisting with the long-range planning, evaluation, and national dissemination of the program. They meet at least weekly with the Institute director during eleven months of the year.
Professor Robert Kellogg, Dean of the College at the University of Virginia and one of our earliest outside evaluators, put the matter well:
In order that the "managerial" aspect of the school administration not be reflected in the operation of the Institute, a small group of teachers, the Institute Coordinators, serves to represent both the schools in the Institute and the Institute in the schools. The conception is ingenious, and the individuals who serve as Coordinators are, more than any other single element, crucial to the Institute's successful operation. The Coordinators I met were thoughtful and intelligent men and women who understood the purpose of the Institute and were effective representatives of the two institutions of which they were members. (1980, p. 2)Ernest L. Boyer wrote in his evaluation report:
The project has teacher-coordinators in each participating school who clearly are committed and who pass on their enthusiasm to colleagues. One of the most impressive features of my visit was the after school session I had with these Coordinators from the New Haven schools. Arriving after a fatiguing day, the teachers turned, with enthusiasm, to key issues. How can the Institute best help us meet our goals? How can we improve our work?. . . The dedication and optimism of these teachers was impressive, almost touching. . . . The significance of teacher leadership cannot be overstated. (198l, p. 2)The process of decision making that I have described and that we have employed in establishing and developing our program, particularly given the number of teachers involved in leadership roles, is cumbersome and time-consuming. It requires patience and persistence. It is also, I am convinced, absolutely necessary if a partnership is to be planned, organized, conducted, and continued in a genuinely collaborative way.
Approaching and Conducting Evaluation
One of the most complicated issues facing collaborative educational programs is that of evaluation, particularly if a stated aim of a program, as is the case with our Institute, is to improve learning in schools. To make valid connections between a teacher's participation in the Institute and students' performance in that teacher's classroom is fraught with difficulty, not to mention the even greater difficulty of reaching more general conclusions about the influence of a program on the culture and social organization of schools. In addition, the type of evidence that one can appropriately compile about the results of collaborative programs is sometimes not the kind of evidence that all of its constituents are seeking. Still, precisely because collaborative programs can achieve only limited, though important, results, and because of their non-traditional and often fragile nature, collaborative programs have a special burden of providing sound evidence of their effectiveness. Moreover, as the movement for university-school collaboration continues to gain momentum across the country; as this movement becomes more sharply focused on excellence in teaching in public schools; and as numerous collaborative programs, some with the Institute's assistance, are being established in other communities, it is vitally important that we deepen our understanding of the ways in which such programs can strengthen teaching and learning in schools. If, in fact, this movement is to be sustained, in New Haven and elsewhere, collaborative programs must be persuasive about the results they can achieve. We believe that the Institute therefore has a responsibility as one of the most visible collaborative programs, as well as an opportunity as one of the programs of longest duration, to attempt to make a contribution to educators and policy makers working in the same vein.
From its inception, the Institute has acted on the belief that ongoing evaluation by participants and others is indispensable to our educational experiment. In our view, collaborationthe meeting and talking togetheris not an end in itself; rather, it is a means of working together on a task important to both the University and the Schools. This is not to say that the process of collaboration is irrelevant or uninteresting, but rather that it should be seen as instrumental. We should evaluateby which I mean study, describe, and analyzethe process of collaboration, but this is insufficient. We must also document and examine the influence of that collaboration on teaching and learning in schools if we are to make responsible claims that collaboration can improve the education of students in schools and contribute thereby to increasing access to educational quality at all levels.
Given, then, both the necessity for and the difficulty in evaluating the process and results of school-college collaboration, there are numerous purposes that evaluation serves. Foremost, evaluation can contribute to the development of the collaboration itself, and should be used continually to refine both goals and activities. To cite our experience in New Haven: From the outset, our largest goals have been clear, but through formal and informal evaluation we have frequently adjusted and readjusted course to assure that the program remains responsive to the needs of New Haven teachers and their students. We are always re-examining program activities and schedule and structure, attempting to do things better, not just to take stock of what we do and do not do well. Evaluation, then, in the sense of formal and informal ways of asking participants to characterize their experiences, to criticize the program, and to assess its results, is also in itself a means of collaboration. It is a way of soliciting and then taking seriously the views and suggestions of the primary beneficiaries of the program, of further involving teachers in planning for the future.
Evaluation can also reveal not only something about how effective a program has been in accomplishing what it was intended to do, but also outcomes that were neither intended nor expected. So, for example, in New Haven we came through evaluation to a greater appreciation of the bearing of our Institute on the morale of the teachers who are Fellows in the program and the ways in which the Institute has aided in retaining them in our urban school districtissues that are no less significant in New Haven than they are nationally.
Of the many other purposes which evaluation serves, I would add only one more: its importance in convincing everyone involved that the program is worthwhile, in gaining and maintaining the interest and support of participants, of the institutions involved, of funders. Evaluation is one of the ways to give legitimacy to what is non-traditional, experimental, or innovative about collaborative programs. Evaluation therefore directly contributes to the continuation and institutionalization of practices developed collaboratively.
As convinced as we are about the importance of ongoing evaluation of collaborative programs, however, I must mention at least two caveats, two of the numerous issues that have arisen as we have developed approaches for evaluating the Institute in New Haven. First is the issue of how much time can and should be devoted to evaluationwhat is the right balance to strike between the activities themselves and study of those activities and their results. This issue has, I think, a special dimension in school-college collaboration because the traditional, if often inappropriate and counterproductive, distinction between schools and colleges has been one of teaching versus scholarship, practice versus research. There is a whole mythology surrounding that distinction, including the view that university research has little or no bearing on improving classroom practicethat in fact school teachers and students may be exploited only to advance the careers of university researchers. Evaluation can be mistakenly seen, therefore, as detracting from rather than contributing to collaboration.
My second point is that evaluation of collaborative programs should be planned and conducted collaboratively. One must be exceedingly sensitive in approaching evaluation of such efforts. If programs are to be collegial, participants must evaluate the programnot the reverse. To do otherwise, to judge the caliber of individuals' participation in a collaborative program rather than the overall outcomes of the program, is inimical to and destructive of collegiality. This means adapting research techniques and developing new strategies for the evaluation of collaborative programs, which result in changes that are so often varied and complex.
Specifically, our evaluation practices thus far have included four principal activities: review by outside consultants, written evaluation by participants, surveys of curriculum unit use, and a system-wide study of the program using lengthy questionnaires with many responses that are suitable for multivariate analysis. Over at least the next three years we will conduct a series of new studies on our program. After describing our past evaluation activities, I will briefly describe those studies.
We have frequently engaged as outside consultants prominent educators to visit New Haven and to prepare descriptive and critical reports on the Institute. In advance of the visit, the consultant is furnished extensive written materials on our program, including previous evaluations. The consultant then visits New Haven for two or three days to meet with participants at the University and the Schools. Some of these visits have occurred during the school year so that the consultant could observe Institute Fellows teaching materials they had developed for their own classrooms. Others have been held while Institute seminars were in session so that the consultant could observe the work of the seminars. We have been particularly fortunate to involve as consultants individuals who have been engaged in recent national studies and reports on American high schools, who have brought a broad and timely perspective to the task, and whose favorable reports have been exceedingly helpful in legitimizing and publicizing the program.
The testimony of Institute participants themselves at the conclusion of each year's program has been another of the most constructive means of evaluation thus far; not only has it documented the Fellows' and seminar leaders' positive opinions of each Institute activity, it has also resulted in several program refinements based on their criticisms and suggestions. Each year Institute Fellows and seminar leaders respond to lengthy questionnaires. In the fall we prepare a digest of Fellows' comments that is distributed to the Institute Coordinators. The Coordinators spend several weeks reviewing this document and considering any changes that should be made in the program for the coming year. Written evaluation by participants is therefore integral to planning each year's program.
We also have periodically surveyed all New Haven teachers, those who have been Fellows and those who have not, concerning their use of the curriculum units Fellows prepare. The principal aims of these surveys have been to determine the proportion of current teachers in each of the academic disciplines the Institute encompasses who have participated in the program, and to reveal the extent and patterns of use of Institute developed materials by Institute participants and other teachers in the schools. We have used the results of these surveys to document the number of teachers, classes, and students using Institute-developed materialsto examine the extent of the Institute's influence on school curricula and classroom instruction.
The results of these surveys have shown that the impact of the Institute is cumulative and has been growing. The most recent such survey, taken at the end of the 1984-1985 school year, showed that almost one-third (3l percent) of all individuals who were then teaching the subjects the Institute addresses in New Haven's public secondary schools had participated in the Institute one or more times between 1978 and 1984. The study revealed that most of the teachers who had taken greatest advantage of the Institute had remained in secondary school teaching in New Haven, and that in terms of their distribution among school departments Institute Fellows were highly representative of all eligible secondary school teachers. The number of school classes in which Institute-developed units were taughtmore than fifteen hundred classes with an attendance of more than thirty thousand studentshad more than doubled since 1982. A third of all New Haven secondary school teacherswhether or not they had been Fellows of the Institutehad used Institute-developed units. A high proportion of units written since 1978 had remained in use, and the use of units did not depend upon how recently they had been written. The overwhelming majority of teachers who had used units (over 97 percent) stated that the curriculum units they had used were both innovative and successful.
In 198l we began to develop questionnaires for a more comprehensive examination of the influence of the Institute on teaching and learning in New Haven middle and high schools. At the same time, we began more systematically to review literature in the field of education that was related to our program. Having searched the literature, we formulated questions for our study based upon current research findings. The lengthy questionnaires that resulted were administered in 1982 to all secondary school teachers in New Haven, whether or not they had participated in the Institute. In 1987 we will readminister this questionnaire with changes made at the suggestion of individuals from the Educational Testing Service. The results of this new system-wide study will provide us with data about changes in the schools over the life of the Institute and will serve as a baseline for further studies.
By 1984 the teachers in the leadership of the Institute, among others, came to believe that, although we had learned a great deal from evaluation practices used in the past, and although their results had been very gratifying, the return from these practices was diminishing. The results were increasingly predictable. Moreover, these practices had proved insufficient to describing fully the collegial process of our program and the complicated and subtle educational changes resulting from it. As we presented the Institute to other educators from across the country, this became increasingly apparent.
The Institute therefore decided to plan fresh approaches to evaluation. During the 1984-1985 school year, our National Advisory Committee, University Advisory Council, and Institute Coordinators worked on developing a series of studies on the ways in which university-school collaboration can strengthen teaching and learning in schools, and, in particular, the bearing of such programs as the Institute on the preparation, morale, effectiveness, and retention of public school teachers. The following is an overview of the plans these groups made for the three new studies which we have now undertaken.
The curricular materials Fellows write are vital to the process of Fellows' participation in the Institute; they are also products of the program which it is important that we study, in part because they are used so widely in New Haven schools. The aim of one new study, a review of the curriculum units written between 1978 and 1985, is to analyze and describe both the subjects and the structure of the curriculum units Fellows have developed in the program. As a first step in reviewing these materials, we prepared a topical index to the units. The Index of Curriculum units organizes by subject the first 4l3 units written in the program, making them more accessible to teachers, who can now readily identify which units are most applicable to their needs. With the aid of the Index we were able also to classify the wide range of topics addressed by the Fellows. This is particularly interesting because university assumptions about academic freedom prevail in the Institute, and teachers have therefore been at liberty to work on those topics on which they believe they most need new materials. The subject-matter categorization of the units reveals the main areas of Fellows' work in the program and the relative distribution of the units within seven general categories: art and architecture, language skills, literature, historical and social studies, psychology and adolescent development, math and computer science, and general and technical sciences.
These categories also provided more manageably-sized groupings of units from which we selected a representative sample for further analysis. The intent of this deeper analysis is twofold. First, we are examining the teaching purposes and outcomes that the units envision. This part of the analysis includes typifying the sources that the authors consulted, the diversity of teaching styles the authors suggest, the classroom activities they propose, and the academic competencies and study skills that they want students to learn. In addition to giving us valuable information about the units as a whole, this will enable us to ascertain whether these elements vary according to the subjects being presented.
The information on teaching purposes and outcomes will be particularly useful for the second immediate aim of the review: to examine how Fellows have used the Institute guidelines for writing curriculum units. The guidelines were developed by teachers in the leadership of the program and represent what they regard to be a highly useful form of curriculum writing for their own use and use by other teachers. We therefore want to learn as much as possible about how teachers have approached this innovative form of curriculum writing. Analysis of the structure of the units in relation to the guidelines may, for example, reveal that the guidelines have been interpreted differently in different fields, or uncover new structural aspects common to the units and thus lead to refinement of the guidelines. It will also, we hope, yield information with which we can expand the guidelines to describe the variety of ways in which teachers have treated structure, as well as voice, audience, social context, and other matters, in their units.
Furthermore, we want in studying the units to learn more about the special genre of writing that they represent, a genre that seeks to unite academic content with pedagogical method. The units reflect a principle of our program: that teaching strategies must be considered in conjunction with, not in isolation from, the subject matter to be taught. Just as each Institute seminar considers not only the seminar subject but also strategies for teaching that subject in school classes, so also each unit addresses both the unit topic and how best to convey that topic to students.
In a second new study we are reviewing retrospectively the responses university and school teachers have written since 1978 in their annual evaluations of the program. As mentioned above, we have used these evaluations by Fellows and seminar leaders to plan the coming year's program, but we have not before studied this body of information as a whole. We are particularly interested to reveal by content analysis the themes in the evaluations and any changes in the themes over the life of the Institute.
Third, to probe more deeply the value of the program to the institutions and the teachers involved, we are constructing narrative accounts of the Institute's work. We hope in this way to study and describe the collaborative process of the Institutethe colleagueship of university and school teachers in organizing, conducting, and participating in the programbetter to depict the educational innovation it represents. This ethnographic study has been designed to yield a richly detailed description of the process of participation in the Institute and of the effects of that process in the careers of the Fellows and within the New Haven school system. Its form was chosen for its capacity to produce a systemic view of the Institute. Our goals are better understanding of the effects of the Institute seminars on the curriculum of Fellows and non Fellows in New Haven schools; the effects of Institute participation on the professional morale of the Fellows; the effects of Institute participation on the Fellows' expectations of their students and on students' levels of enthusiasm and performance; and the contribution of the Institute to the retention of teachers in the New Haven school system. Our research methods, principally observation and open-ended interview, are intended to complement the objective and essay questionnaires of other studies. This study, in keeping with other aspects of the Institute program, has been planned so that the Fellows, the principal subjects, are active collaborators, contributing to conceptualization of the research and to the research itself.
Continuing the Partnership: The University Perspective
Consistent with the Institute's primary aim of assisting our community's public schools, the present essay has focused on the development of our program mainly from the perspective of the involvement of school teachers and the potential benefits to the Schools. I should return, however, to an issue mentioned at the outset, and address the benefits of the program to the University.:As President A. Bartlett Giamatti pointed out in an interview on the December 7, 1980, David Susskind television program, "It is profoundly in our self-interest to have coherent, well-taught, well-thought-out curricula" in our local schools and in secondary schools throughout the country. The Institute and its dissemination are important to Yale in terms of future students, and also in terms of what faculty members who lead Institute seminars gain from the program. They increase their knowledge about public schools and the background of many of their own students. Many faculty members speak also about how their experience in the Institute has contributed to their own teaching and scholarship.
The Institute is a most natural way for the University to be involved with pre-college education, drawing on the University's existing strength and tradition of academic excellence. In the absence of a school or department of education, the Institute serves as a center for faculty from throughout the institution who care deeply about both public education and the New Haven community and who wish to have a practical and constructive involvement. In the past, the Institute has drawn its faculty from both Yale College and the Graduate School and the Schools of Architecture, Art, Divinity, Forestry and Environmental Studies, Law, and Medicine. The Institute is also of unquestioned value with respect to the University's relationship with New Haven. Yale's future and New Haven's are bound together in important ways. The Institute represents what Yale as an educational institution most has to offer New Haven. It has become a principal bridge between the University and the City, part of the educational and human infrastructure of our community. It is an alliance of the University and Schools, together with the City administration, business, and labor in our community.
Since the beginning of the Institute, the New Haven Federation of Teachers has been highly supportive of the program because of the ways in which it advances teachers' interests. In the New Haven business community, many executives recognize that a strong public school system fulfills a basic need for employees, their families, and the community generally. These executives see that the quality of our public schools is vitally important for attracting and retaining corporations in New Haven, and that it is linked to economic development, to the tax base, and to the economic health of our community and region. They see that the school system is a major factor in families' decisions about where to live, and where they therefore pay taxes and purchase goods and services. Not only is the monetary support of these corporations for the Institute important, the corporate executives with whom we have worked also have become more knowledgeable about the positive developments in our schools. In that these individuals are leaders in our community, by involving them in improving our schools we can foster greater public support for public education.
As Ernest Boyer wrote in his evaluation of the program,
The Institute is an educational venture and when measured on this yardstick it has been a great success. However, I cannot avoid observing that the project is a political success as well. It has put a human face on the University, opened doors, and focused resources where they are needed most. The University has gained enormously from the Institute and I conclude that for both educational and community reasons the program should be nurtured and sustained. (198l, p. 4)These are among the reasons the partnership became an institutional priority for Yale. Initially, the Institute was supported in part out of discretionary funds at Yale from the President's Office and the Office of Community and State Relations. In time, however, the Institute received its own departmental budget, in spite of the fact that the University was then experiencing severe financial constraints and was making reductions in faculty and in other areas. The University budget for the program has been increased periodically, and this has been a potent symbol of the institution's commitment to the program.
In 1984, President Giamatti commissioned the University Council on Priorities and Planning to examine Yale's relations with the City of New Haven. The Council chose to address three areas of the "town-gown" relationship; the dominant of these was public education. The Council wrote:
Yale's principal mission is education. Thus, it seems only natural that Yale concentrate its community efforts upon helping the local public schools meet the enormous challenge of preparing a significantly poor and undereducated population to compete successfully in America's increasingly technical job market. The benefits of a stronger school system extend, moreover, beyond the students assisted directly. Improved public schools provide greater neighborhood stability, make the community a more attractive place to live and create a positive environment for business investment. Both the City and Yale gain appreciably once this process has set in. (1984, pp. 26-7)The Institute assumed a prominent position in the Council's discussion of the University's involvement with public education. The Institute, the Council wrote, "deserve[s] to be expanded and sufficiently funded with the University's active assistance to ensure that [it] remains a permanent component of Yale's efforts to improve public education in New Haven." First among the Council's recommendations was their statement that a $4 million endowment should be established for the Institute.
Our present endowment campaign underscores our deep belief in the long term significance of the Teachers Institute to the University, to our local public schools, and to our community generally. We hope also that, because our program addresses in microcosm some of the most pressing problems of urban public education, its continuation can contribute to collaborative work between universities and schools in other places. The campaign represents our determination to demonstrate that collaborative programs can be not only developed but also sustained, so that they can have a lasting effect.
References
Boyer, Ernest L. 1981.An Evaluation of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Unpublished report.Council on Priorities and Planning. 1984. Report of the Council on Priorities and Planning, 1983-1984. New Haven: Yale University.
Kellogg, Robert. 1980. An Evaluation of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Unpublished report.
National Coalition of Advocates for Students. 1985. Barriers to Excellence: Our Children At Risk. Boston: National Coalition of Advocates for Students.
National School Boards Association. 1983. A Survey of Public Education in the Nation's Urban School Districts. Washington, D.C.: National School Boards Association.
Rae, Douglas. 1983. The Extent, Distribution, and Causes of Poverty in New Haven: Phase I Report of the Special Commission on Poverty. New Haven: City of New Haven.
Sarason, Seymour B. 1971. The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Sizer, Theodore R. 1983. "An Evaluation of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute." Unpublished report.
Vivian, James R. 1985a. Teaching in America: The Common Ground. New York: College Board.
Vivian, James R. 1985b. "Empowering Teachers as Colleagues." In William T. Daly (Ed.), Sourcebook on High School-College Collaboration. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Vivian, James R. 1986. "Yale University: Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute." In Ron Fortune (Ed.), School-College Collaborative Programs in Writing and Literature. New York: MLA.