Spotlight on Partners Alumni: Deanna Rolffs

In this series of posts, we feature Partners “alumni” — former staff members and clients. We describe their current professional activities and how the skill sets and mindsets developed during their time with Partners are serving them today. This post spotlights Deanna Rolffs (she/they), who was a Partners staff member from 2012 to 2016.

What has been your path from your work with Partners In School Innovation to your current role?

After leaving Partners in 2016, I joined the executive leadership team of a nonprofit dedicated to housing justice, supporting people experiencing income inequality and racism in the home-ownership and banking systems. 

In 2018, I joined Design Group International’s community of practice that is dedicated to process consulting (walking alongside, listening, helping, and learning) instead of product consulting (selling, telling, and centering consultant expertise). My practice has centered around organizational change, leadership and team development, and anti-oppression.  

I was honored to become a partner at Design Group International in 2021 in addition to holding my own client portfolio. I’m dedicated to walking alongside leaders and teams in all sectors, supporting them to plan and implement the transformation and change that they seek.

What has been one of your biggest challenges, and what have you learned?

Leaders ask me critical questions daily, seeking support, tools, and resources to solve their knottiest leadership and equity challenges. I wondered if, in addition to working directly with clients, I could provide lighter-touch support to leaders by writing. In 2021, I wanted to start a blog but was petrified! Who was I to write a blog? What did I have to offer? 

I learned that I didn’t have to have all of the answers, but I love to hold brave spaces with adult learners. Before launching the blog, I traded coaching with Malika Amandi, the founder of The Center for Women’s Voice who helped me identify the WHY and HOW of my blog Leadership & Learning Letters. After eighteen months of blogging, readership is consistently growing, currently reaching 700 hits a month. 

My goals are to spark thinking, unpack the complexity of thorny challenges, share real-time scenarios, build community, and elevate liberatory frames with the end-goal of facilitating justice and equity education, practice, accountability, and outcomes. I encourage the readers of Partners’ blog to check out mine when they can. My 2022 Leadership + Frameworks series, including Leadership + Intersectionality and Leadership + Critical Race Theory may be of particular interest. Those interested in subscribing to my blog can do so here.

What one or two learnings from Partners have been most useful in your coaching work?

Everything! I credit my time at Partners with helping me become an authentic human dedicated to disrupting inequity. As a white, gender nonbinary person, this work includes ongoing learning about systemic racism, racial inequity, doing my own inside-out work, growing bravery, increasing comfort with discomfort, and learning how to be a white person working for racial equity. 

Partners protocols, resources and frameworks are gifts that keep giving, and I use them daily. Additionally, it was an honor and joy to serve on Partners’ Alumni Advisory Committee in 2021-22. The relationships I’ve built with Partners colleagues and school and district leaders continue to be the most life-giving. For example, I’m grateful to have just begun a 14-month project with a previous PSI district to develop an anti-oppression curriculum. I’m daily inspired by this generation of leaders who are working to do good, honest, messy, critical, liberatory, anti-oppression work. Talk about full-circle. Partners did that. 

Partners Board Member Elected to National Academy of Education

 

In 2022, Partners board member Jennifer O’Day, Ph.D. was elected to the National Academy of Education, an honorific society of researchers and educators who have made outstanding contributions to improving education. Dr. O’Day was one of 17 people elected to membership this year. As a member of the Academy, O’Day will have the opportunity to serve on expert study panels that address pressing issues in education and engage in the Academy’s professional development fellowship programs.

Jennifer is an Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and in that role she has carried out research, advised national and state policy makers, and written extensively in the areas of systemic standards-based reform, educational equity, accountability, and capacity-building and continuous improvement strategies. In recent years, much of her work has focused on the role that school districts can play in systemic improvement and transformation.

As part of that effort, she is the founder of the California Collaborative on District Reform, which brings together researchers, district practitioners, state policy makers, advocates, and funders to improve instruction, increase opportunity and access for traditionally underserved students, and eliminate outcome gaps.

O’Day’s most recent major publication was the 2019 book, Opportunity for All: A Framework for Quality and Equality in Education, co-authored by Marshall S. Smith.

Partners Stakeholder 2021-22 Update

The Partners team is doing excellent work in different parts of the country and creating an exciting vision for the organization’s future. To learn more, check out this update.

Our Vision for the Future

During the past two years, Partners has embarked on a project with the ultimate goal of crafting a new 5-7 year vision in order to have a greater impact on improving outcomes for low-income students of color post COVID. After interviews with multiple key stakeholders (e.g., key reformers, allies, supporters, district partners) and several feedback sessions with our staff and board members, we recognize the next phase of Partners life must be about catalyzing a movement to produce the kinds of cultures in schools that create and sustain a deep well of respect for community, love of children and momentum for improvement.

To create more of these lively, loving, learning communities, we must develop Results Oriented Change Agents (ROCAs) capable of establishing and maintaining such communities in collaboration with others, share the stories of those we have learned from over the last 20+ years to create inspiration and belief in what is possible, and expand the reach of our knowledge so those who prepare the teachers and leaders for our schools can be influenced by what we have learned.

In December 2021, our board came to a consensus around the following long term goals for the next 5-7 years. These include:  

1. Partners has strong evidence that Partners’ work produces equitable and sustained results.
2. Partners is recognized as the top national leader in achieving equitable results.
3. Partners is developing effective, empowered, and respected leaders for school transformation at every level of the system -- pre-school, K-12, district, region, etc.
4. Partners has a business model at the scale needed to achieve sustainable organizational success.

Our next steps in this process are to ask our constituents if they feel these are the right goals for us in moving forward and then put together a strategic plan in Summer/Fall of 2022. 

Our Work in Action:

Success Network in Philadelphia

Just as in San Jose, the pandemic has created a challenging environment for schools in Philadelphia and has required Partners to adapt our approach to supporting educators there. 

One of our projects in the City of Brotherly Love involves supporting a set of eight K-8 schools called the “Success Network.” We’re helping the network’s teachers, instructional coaches, and principals become equity-focused change agents by building their capacity to implement our approach to transforming schools.

Although our focus is on long-term capacity-building, we have had to adapt to current circumstances and help educators with their immediate challenges. When the pandemic was hitting schools especially hard, principals were consumed with operational challenges such as contact-tracing, quarantining, social distancing, and finding substitute teachers. As a consequence, school leaders were unable to focus on instructional leadership as much as they would like. Partners staff stepped into that gap, touching base frequently with teachers to support their instruction and keeping principals informed of progress to help schools maintain strong instruction.

We also shifted our approach by supporting schools to include students’ voices in their transformation plans. Each school in the network is developing ideas about the causes of its key challenges and about possible solutions. Experience is showing that students and their families need to be a part of those discussions. This is partly because strategies are more successful when all stakeholders are involved in their formation, and partly because change-ideas will better withstand any post-pandemic turnover of educators if those ideas have broader roots.

Our Work in Action:

East Side Alliance Network in San Jose, California

We have entered our second year of partnership with the East Side Alliance, a consortium of the East Side Union High School District and its seven feeder elementary districts in San Jose, CA. As part of our work funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Network for School Improvement, this partnership focuses on expanding the capacity of educators, partnering with them to design solutions, and building their confidence and capability to better educate their students.

We started this second year of partnership knowing that teacher capacity would be limited due to the need to continue to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. 

Therefore, we predicted that focusing on high leverage areas would allow school sites to have a clear focus and a strong foundation for the work this year. Some of the focus areas include: 

• Student Learning Goals - School leaders establish clearly defined, measureable, accelerated, and equitable goals for student learning (e.g., core academic goals, reducing suspension rates, engaging families, etc.).
• Theory of Action - School leaders identify annual priorities for improving the instructional program (including curriculum, instruction, assessment and intervention) and for strengthening the culture of the school community to meet their student learning goals.
• Professional Learning Plans - School leaders develop a plan for supporting teachers to improve their practice that includes clear expectations, roles and responsibilities, structures, and resources to support and monitor improvement.

At this mid-year point, we have seen growth in these areas in part due to our implementation of a leadership collaborative and the support we have been able to provide during our regular check-ins with school leaders this year. It’s worth noting, the leadership collaborative is a new space this year and formed out of a need for school site leaders and district leaders to improve communication around priorities. Additionally, we hosted summer sessions with school leaders in August 2021. These sessions were attended by 100% of the network school leaders and consisted of helping teams develop their Theory of Action. The sessions proved to be extremely helpful in getting leaders ready to start the work this year.

CEO’s Message

As part of the visioning work that Partners has engaged in over the last year, we have thought a lot about the importance of ensuring schools are centers for health and wellness. Our aspiration is that schools are transformed into lively, loving, learning communities.

When we say “lively,” we want them to be spaces where students are not simply sitting in classroom seats but are instead powerfully engaged with ideas, excited by what they are learning and working in collaboration with peers to master key concepts and skill every day. When we refer to “loving,” we believe schools should be communities that respect and inspire teachers, students, and families by loving their whole selves, and valuing caring relationships. When we say “learning,” we envision schools being a space where everyone involved owns their roles as learners in the space and not only students. That rigorous and culturally respectful learning is valuable for everyone, making it possible to make mistakes, take risks and support one another’s growth.

As we continue this school year, we are cautiously optimistic that the worst of the pandemic is behind us. We hope the 2022-23 school year will be more “normal,” but we also aspire to a new normal. A normal where the voices of parents and students are meaningfully engaged, and models with proven technologies will become part of business as usual. 

As we move forward in this work, Partners is also taking steps to determine what our new normal looks like as an organization so we can emerge from this pandemic better equipped to serve the communities that need our support. I encourage you to continue to follow our progress and thank you for braving this challenging work with us.  

Amplifying Our Work

A goal of Partners continues to be building awareness about, and the reputation of, Partners in order to become the nationally recognized leader in equity-focused school improvement. As part of this, we have continued to seek opportunities to spread our message. 

In the last year, staff have successfully presented (virtually) at the Carnegie Summit on “Developing Equity-Focused Leaders for Improvement: Cases from a research-based framework.” We also completed stories from the field that highlight how we help educators build their capacity in various aspects of school-improvement. Additionally, we continue to pursue opportunities to write articles in magazines that reach thousands of educators. For example, we are currently working on an article that discusses how educators can “up their equity game” for a magazine that is distributed to California’s school and district leaders.

Last but certainly not least, we are in the process of writing a book which will be geared toward educators (teachers, coaches, principals, district leaders) and will document our approach and impact across different regions! To date, we have worked with a consultant to support us in developing four chapters and have identified a publisher. We are aiming to complete the book by fall 2022 and will outline a marketing plan to amplify the book-release across multiple platforms. There will be more details on all of this in the coming months so stay tuned! 

CEO’s Corner: Partnerships & New Opportunities in FY21-22

We kicked off our new fiscal year on August 1, 2021 and are continuing to grow our footprint in California and the Mid-Atlantic by supporting twelve school districts in California and seven separate contracts with the School District of Philadelphia. As part of this work, we also have a few new partnership opportunities in 2021-22 that we are very excited about. 

Strategic Support 

• West Contra Costa Unified School District 
• Santa Clara Unified School District 
• Sausalito Marin City School District 
• Milpitas School District 
• San Francisco Unified School District 
• Oakland Unified School District 
• School District of Philadelphia 
• Battle Creek Public Schools 
• Hewlett Network

Success Network (Gates Cohort 1) - Philadelphia

• School District of Philadelphia

Middle Grades Success Network (Gates Cohort 2) - Philadelphia 

• School District of Philadelphia 

Middle Grades Impact Team Network (Gates Cohort 2) - Bay Area, CA

• Berryessa Unified School District 
• Evergreen School District
• Franklin-McKinley School District
• Oak Grove School District - note, also receiving some strategic support at district level 
• Mount Pleasant Elementary School District

Middle Grades Math Network (Gates Cohort 3) - Los Angeles, CA

• Los Angeles Unified School District 

Partners has teamed up with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support six school districts in addressing district transformation through any combination of five problems of practice -- family engagement, district systems of support, teacher professional learning, student voice, and equity. The six districts are located throughout the United States and include Hemet and West Contra Costa in California; Akron and Cleveland in Ohio; Jackson, Mississippi; and Baltimore, Maryland.

We are also excited for the opportunity to work with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Networks for School Improvement initiative (Cohort 3). This cohort will support eight schools serving middle grades students in the west and south regions of Los Angeles and will focus on boosting the academic performance of Black students, an area where the district is particularly lagging.

In addition, Partners will partner with Oakland Unified School District and their recently developed task force charged with learning the best practices in reparative support for Black students and executing those in Oakland. Partners' role will be to collaborate with district and task force leaders to develop an African American Student Success Scorecard and support the planning and facilitation of the task force meetings. We will also bring to the table the experience of other districts and cities (e.g., Evanston, IL and Asheville, NC) undertaking the work of providing Black families with reparations to inform the work in Oakland. Lastly, Partners will document the entire process to produce a playbook that can be used by other districts interested in taking this approach.

Lastly, our new partnership with Battle Creek Public Schools in Battle Creek, MI will focus on coaching at the district level. Partners will provide coaching and professional learning support for district coaches and their supervisors that deepens their coaching skill set and data-driven improvement culture to ensure equitable impact (attending to the relational and technical aspects of coaching within the district system). Additionally, we will support the refinement of STAR visits through engaging with key stakeholders and updating processes to ensure the visits are purposeful and powerful. 

Partners Announces New Board Chair and New Board Members

We are pleased to announce that our former Vice Chair of our Board of Directors Michael Hornsby has moved into the role of Board Chair! Michael has 20 years of experience providing senior leaders with high-value technical, operational, and strategic advice.

He currently serves as a Customer Success Director at Salesforce where he works with global executives as a trusted advisor, striving to deliver maximum value to their businesses. Prior to Salesforce, Michael spent eight years in the Obama administration as the Chief of Staff in the Office of Administration. In 2015, he also served as the Acting Chief Information Officer for the White House, where he provided stability and led his team through a major reorganization and service-delivery design. 

Michael has served on Partners' board since 2017, and we have benefited greatly from his expertise. We look forward to continuing our work with him in this new capacity as well. 

When asked why he is passionate about Partners and our mission, Michael stated:

“I met Derek in 2002, in Oakland, and we developed a lasting bond. Derek has always impressed me with his ability to make deep and meaningful connections. When he and a former board member approached me about joining Partners' board, I was in a way compelled to say yes. Partners is the type of organization that I wish had supported me during my first year of teaching. I consider my teaching experience (albeit brief) the most rewarding and meaningful work in which I’ve engaged. Partners makes me hopeful in that it enables well-meaning communities of educators that seek to engage marginalized students whose untapped or unrecognized potential may limit their outcomes. I am driven to support Partners because it sees and works to create a world without those limitations.”  

We are also happy to announce the addition of three new board members including Frances Teso, Niket Desai, and Paul Goren.