Philly Stakes:
When Partnership Becomes Practice

Ebby paused the clip, and the group discussed the teacher’s techniques. “The sentence starters [a term for a strategy to support students’ language use] are geared toward connection,” offered one participant. “He gave students think time,” said another.

Ebby nodded. “These are all intentional moves,” she said. “You want to think about how we shift the pattern of talk in our classrooms—math classrooms and other classrooms—so students can put half-formed ideas out there and make them better. That’s not easy to do. By using particular ‘talk moves’ [a term for research-based discussion prompts], we can help students clarify their own thinking, listen to one another, deepen their reasoning, and think with others.”

The Algebra 1 Fellowship is one of numerous partnerships between Penn GSE and SDP. Some, like GSE’s ongoing relationship with nearby Henry C. Lea Elementary School, span decades. Another—a ground-up collaboration between Penn, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and the district—is the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School, a National Blue Ribbon winner and one of the highest-performing public schools in the city. Others involve faculty research across communities or district-level ventures that bring together multiple players. In addition, graduate students regularly interact with schools to complete practicum hours, conduct thesis studies, or tutor students.

During the last school year, Penn GSE had 343 ongoing activities running in 166 of the city’s public, charter, and private schools and in 63 community sites, such as libraries, community centers, and mental health organizations, according to GSE’s Office of School and Community Engagement (OSCE), which tracks the School’s engagement across Philadelphia.

While that illustrates the broad scope of GSE’s partnership with schools and community sites across the city, it does not capture the important depth of the partner-driven, co-designed programmatic and research endeavors in which faculty, staff, and students are engaged. Over the last decade—and since 2023, in particular—collaborations with the district have become more focused on systemwide, intentional change. Of late, GSE has redoubled its focus on what SDP considers its most pressing challenges and ways to help co-create solutions.

“We are working towards greater coherence and strategic support in our ongoing work with the school district,” Dean Katharine Strunk said. “This kind of co-constructed, partnership-driven work is based on a deep and growing trust between SDP and GSE, one that truly allows us to understand and expand on the tremendous assets the district brings to the conversation.”

That starts with what she identified as “a great deal of synergy,” between strategic plans—the district’s Accelerate Philly and GSE’s Together for Good, the first in more than two decades and one that prioritizes collaboration. Dean Strunk argues that this urban district/higher-ed teamwork can serve as a national model to support learners and educators.

“We believe that educators, leaders, students, and families in the district know what they need,” she said. “We have a responsibility to do whatever we can to help them meet those needs.”

SDP Superintendent Tony B. Watlington, Sr. said “the power of partnerships” is critical in propelling the school system toward its goal of becoming the fastest-improving, large, urban district in the nation. “We have put our foot on the gas,” he said. “We intend to accelerate.”

OSCE

A Decade of Citywide Impact

As Penn GSE’s Office of School and Community Engagement (OSCE) marks its 10th anniversary, its model has evolved from supporting partnerships with individual neighborhood schools to running summer programs with broader reach, spearheading initiatives impacting multiple schools and communities across the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), and researching the effectiveness of those collaborations.

“Our role in these 10 years is really to be a dynamic nexus between the expertise and resources of Penn GSE and the priorities and needs of the communities around us, with a primary focus on schools,” said Caroline Watts, senior lecturer and OSCE’s founding director. “It’s really about research to practice.”

Penn GSE had partnered with SDP and its local communities for decades. But in 2016, then-dean Pam Grossman made community and school engagement a central mission, launching OSCE to formalize that work.

Initially, it provided more coordinated and robust support to the school–University liaisons at nearby partners Henry C. Lea and Penn Alexander elementary schools. But later in its first year, OSCE expanded beyond individual schools, launching the Responsive Math Teaching Project in West and Southwest Philadelphia under the leadership of Senior Lecturer Caroline B. Ebby, GRD’97. The system for K–8 math teachers and leaders, co-developed with the district, provided professional development for over 250 local educators and led to a 2025 book that helps teachers transform their math instruction.

In 2018, Julie Berger, GED’13, GED’19, joined OSCE—first as a graduate assistant, then as full-time coordinator, and now as senior associate director—doubling its staff. Charged with further documenting GSE–SDP partnerships, she began conducting an annual survey to provide a centralized database of GSE collaborations across the city. At last count, GSE ran 343 activities during the 2024–2025 school year.

The pandemic became a turning point, shifting OSCE’s focus from teacher professional development to direct student services. “During COVID,” Berger said, “principals wanted help reacclimating students to school.” OSCE’s summer academic enrichment program, run in collaboration with the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, reached nearly 300 pupils. While it ended in 2023, when COVID-19 funding ran out, the direct student services model inspired OSCE’s tutoring initiative, which now runs at both Henry C. Lea and Andrew Hamilton schools.

“Everyone in the country was trying to start a tutoring program in the wake of COVID,” Berger said. OSCE’s “secret sauce” focuses on pedagogical and engagement training for volunteer Penn GSE and undergraduate tutors—about 50 a semester—and an on-site coordinator for support. Ebby and Berger also are beginning to study the experience’s impact on tutors’ interest in pursuing education careers.

As Alicia Augustin, C’26, a recent grad who majored in political science, got involved in the tutoring program, she re-envisioned her future, deciding to pursue a career in education policy. “The tutoring experience really helped me see firsthand how minority communities are impacted by disproportionate resources and funding,” she said. Augustin added urban education as a minor and is headed to Georgetown University next year to pursue a master’s in educational transformation, advocacy, and policy.

In 2025, OSCE’s successes led to the Academy at Penn college- and career-readiness program, a five-year initiative that provides year-round counseling, exposure, and enrichment activities throughout high school.

“That’s really a measure of what this office has been about,” Watts said. “If you go back to what people at GSE were saying in 2016, they wanted more capacity. Well, this network is capacity.”

The dean responded: “Game on. We’ll be a partner.”

That was the genesis of the Algebra 1 Fellowship—arguably a case study in how recent partnerships between Penn GSE and SDP develop and succeed. From there, the School and the district got down to the nitty gritty of crafting a bespoke program together to address this critical year in the math curriculum. At the time, the 2023–2024 Keystone Exam showed only 27 percent of district students passed the algebra test, down from 30 percent the prior year, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Penn Learning Network (PLN), GSE’s professional development and continuing education hub, came up with a soup-to-nuts proposal after several iterations with the district, one that bridged research-to-classroom practice, said PLN Executive Director Lara Paparo, GED’06, GRD’24. GSE also secured substantial financial support from the Philadelphia-based Neubauer Family Foundation that has a strong relationship with the School.

“Part of the process,” said Paparo, “is getting the right people in the room. We do a lot of listening, paying attention to details of what district stakeholders are saying about goals and problems of practice.”

Michael Farrell, GRD’22, the district’s chief learning officer, knew GSE could help. He had benefited from the School’s partnerships when he was principal at Penn Alexander. In this case, Farrell said, “it wasn’t just, ‘Here’s a problem. We’re putting it on Penn to solve.’ There’s a real, ongoing dialogue.”

Paparo attributes candid talk about what works and what doesn’t to long-term connections, made possible by Penn GSE graduates who are now working throughout the district or teachers-turned-Penn researchers. “A lot of these meetings start with hugs,” said the former classroom teacher who was a classmate of Farrell’s.

Last May, a short six months after Homecoming, the School launched the fellowship, aiming to reach the district’s 260-plus Algebra 1 teachers over three years. Fellows, who receive roughly $5,000 for their participation, spent August 2025 in a four-day Summer Institute on campus led by Penn GSE faculty, getting intensive exposure to research-based methods for teaching algebra. The cohort then continued to meet monthly via Zoom in nine small-group professional learning communities and at three in-person professional development days led by Ebby and Janine Remillard, professor and chair of GSE’s Learning, Teaching, and Literacies division. Participants also received individualized classroom support from district instructional coaches. The goal? To build a collaborative, citywide network of algebra educators.

“We don’t do nice, cute projects for optics purposes,” Watlington said. “We’re laser-focused on what are the partnerships with [GSE] that can help this school district get standardized scores up, the four-year graduation rate up, and the dropout rate down.”

To that end, evaluation is built into the bones of every project, something Dean Strunk called delivering feedback at “the pace of policy and practice, as opposed to the pace of research in academia.”

Think: surveys throughout the school year, research assistants observing classrooms, comparison of fellows’ and non-fellows’ instructional practices, and analysis of test data. A November 2025 survey found participants most valued coaching, with 80 percent of respondents saying they received specific instructional strategies, Bonilla said. Fellows overall viewed professional development as meaningful, she added, but several suggested eighth-grade algebra teachers be grouped together to allow for more collaboration around middle school needs. So groupings were tweaked.

“The fact the findings are being fed back in real-time to inform decision-making is unique,” she said. “And that was built into the program because the district didn’t want to wait three, four, five years to get a final report. It wanted continuous improvement.”

The first year was so successful that not only is the fellowship continuing with another cohort in Philadelphia this summer, but PLN is hoping it can be a national model. They are launching in Allentown School District, in partnership with Superintendent Carol D. Birks and Deputy Superintendent Amelia Coleman, GED’04, GRD’22, this summer.

Take the first-of-its-kind Pioneering AI in School Systems (PASS) professional development program. Piloted in SDP last year, PASS was designed to guide educators and school and district leaders on AI usage policy and train them on innovative ways to bring the tool into the classroom, while also addressing ethical considerations. It expanded, thanks to a $1 million investment from the philanthropic arm of Google, to two rural Pennsylvania intermediate units and four districts in the Commonwealth, Delaware, and New Jersey this year—evidence of its effectiveness, said L. Michael Golden, GRD’07, the School’s vice dean of innovative programs and partnerships who also leads Catalyst @ Penn GSE. In addition, he said, the Marrazzo Family Foundation, which first funded the pilot, is now supporting another round of PASS in Philadelphia.

“Our success has been in identifying the root cause of an issue or the core elements of opportunities,” said Golden, “and creating, in coordination with the district, solutions that fit the complexity of the system and match the insights our team can bring.”

Penn GSE also is helping to expand, along with Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development, a program around “dialogue across differences” at SDP’s request by focusing on actionable strategies to deescalate tension around current events. (GSE is creating programming for teachers and leaders, and Temple is focused on the student-engagement portion of the work.) The alliance between potential rivals is unusual, Dean Strunk said. “The three of us believe firmly if we all work together,” she said, “we can achieve more than if we’re competing or trying to figure out silently what the other is doing.”

Each cohort of 50 students has access to additional counselors during the school day and enrichment activities after school, Saturdays, and in the summer that include workshops on Latinx studies, solar energy, and, the surprise hit, financial literacy. Check-ins continue post-graduation. “We’re building a coordinated system designed to remove barriers and ensure students have the support they need to succeed,” said Academy Director Saida Harpi, GED’22. “Our program focuses on students in the middle who might otherwise get lost in the system.”

Adina Goldstein, C’17, GRD’26, the Academy’s site director, said the concept responds to college-prep programs that got first-generation students admitted but then saw high dropout rates. “This program expands beyond admissions,” she said. “It focuses on holistic development.”

So far, students have given it a thumbs up, with 100 percent of participants agreeing in a survey that the Academy is a good use of their time, Harpi said. Furness High School sophomore Joseph De La Cruz Castro, a would-be lawyer, has gone on field trips to the Poconos, local college campuses, and workplaces (including a city law firm) and learned about coding.

“If I hadn’t gone through the program,” he said, “I never would have had these experiences. They’re helping me build my little résumé, who I am and what I do after school. I’m not just going home. I’ve got some personality about me.”

“The fellowship provided a space to refine my effectiveness through coaching and collaboration,” Zimmerman said a few days after the professional development program. “I’m the kind of teacher who lives for the ‘why’ behind the math, and I love designing lessons that get students truly engaged.”

Those are words that affirm Penn GSE’s approach.

“We’re asking teachers to change how they’re teaching,” Ebby said. “They need support of colleagues, of coaches alongside them in the classroom, not just experts. With the Algebra 1 Fellowship, we were able to put all those pieces together.

“It’s a true partnership,” she adds, speaking words that could surely apply to any one of GSE’s custom-made collaborations.

Alumni Partners in Practice

“The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) can’t do everything by itself,” said Laura Boyce, GED’09, executive director of the city-based nonprofit Teach Plus Pennsylvania. “Partnerships are really important to ensure we’re implementing evidence-based practices, that teachers and students are getting the support they need.”

A chapter of a national organization in 11 states, the 10-person group runs six programs and focuses on early literacy, Pennsylvania education policy and advocacy, and teacher leadership. It has a network of over 1,000 teachers statewide, including over 500 in Philadelphia.

“We work to bring teachers to the table, whether at the school district or policy level, to help make the education system work better for students and advance equity,” said the former principal who shifted to nonprofit work in 2017. “Very often their voices are excluded.”

In one district partnership, Teach Plus worked with several Philly schools to support teacher leaders in strengthening early literacy instruction. Currently, it’s working with a coalition to create an apprenticeship pathway to become a teacher—one way to address the instructor shortage, Boyce said. Teach Plus also offers policy fellowships that help educators navigate the state legislature and advocate for policy solutions to pressing issues, she said.

Elevate 215, launched in 2011 as the Philadelphia School Partnership before changing its name in 2022, also educates families on school options and advocates to improve the conditions for the citywide education system, said Holland.

In one instance, the group’s Philadelphia Citywide Talent Coalition funded a recruitment campaign that identified 3,000 aspiring teachers, Holland said. It also convenes this cross-sector to identify strategies that will improve the recruitment, development, and retention of teachers. “The solutions are complex,” she said. “We need talented people to construct solutions that can improve and support the citywide educator workforce.”