The Influence of Policy Inducements and Embedded Relations on the Formation and Operations of Partnerships
Our findings call into question assumptions made about the importance of embeddedness for achieving partnership outcomes. A history of interactions among partners was hypothesized to be important to the creation of outcomes. In our data this turned out not be the case for transformative outcomes. The highest level of transformation (Cell 4) was associated with the lowest level of embeddedness. These respondents indicated that they did not prefer the same history of interaction and were quite likely to engage in a partnership with organizations that they did not know well.
One explanation for this pattern of behavior is that much of the transformative outcomes reported in Cell 4 stem concern the partnership itself and the capacity of partners to maintain and grow this IOR. Respondents in Cell 3 behaved more in accord with the hypothesis, valuing embeddedness and achieving transformative results. However, the greatest transformative outcomes are associated with school districts and the capacity of these organizations to sustain programs that are enabling teacher development and student achievement. At this point we cannot identify the crucial difference between the respondents in Cell 4 and Cell 3 as in most of the other factors observed here are similar.
Policy inducements demonstrated relatively little variance across the cells. Partnership is primarily a federal game driven by grants programs that provide the resources for educational organizations to explore alternative working arrangements and strategies for improving teacher and student performance. Across the cells there is little variance in this pattern where the federal government is the primary sponsor. State governments are also important actors for about two-thirds of the respondents but it is always (save one respondent) in conjunction with federal policies. However there are differences between those respondents that achieve transformational results and those that do not. In both Cell 3 and Cell 4 where transformational results have occurred respondents see federal and state policies as an important and mostly positive force. In Cells 1 and 2 there is a greater likelihood for a respondent to see policy influences as a negative force for the purposes of STEM education. The most common comments about policy in these cells referred to accountability requirements associated with high stakes testing.
Partnerships also have the potential to act as a change agent for policy. Respondents in Cells 3 and 4 both experienced significant transformational outcomes and both reported policy impacts as an outcome from the project. This distinguishes the respondents in these Cells from
their counterparts in Cells 1 and 2 who had greater impacts in programmatic outcomes and view themselves as constrained by policy.
