Partnership for Los Angeles Schools

Webinar - August 25, 2021

For the Love of Community: Healing & Rebuilding Equitably During the Ongoing Pandemic

Join us as we bring together leaders in the education, health, housing, philanthropy, and government sectors to answer a central question, “how do we heal and what will it take to equitably rebuild with and for communities?”

LA Times features Jordan High School Graduate

“She became a citizen one day and graduated near the top of her high school class the next”

This LA Times story highlights Pilar Diaz Bombino, who emigrated from Cuba in 2006 and was sworn in as a citizen of the United States on June 8, 2021. And on Wednesday, June 9, she graduated from Jordan High School with a 4.021! (Photo credit: Steve Lopez)

How School Districts Can Help Connect Students With High-Speed Internet Now

Read our third equity alert focused on the digital divide and our recommendations for how school districts can take action now to ensure all students have home broadband by fall 2021.

Learn more here.

Navigating the path to college completion for LA students

In May, as high school seniors make decisions about enrolling in college, we published a new policy brief entitled, “More than a Dream: Using ‘Best Fit’ College Advising to Help Students of Color Succeed.” This brief highlights key data that students and families should have access to when making their college decisions.

Read Our latest policy brief

The Partnership Playbook for School Transformation

The fundamentals of school transformation are as important as ever. As we face a new future of public schooling brought about by a global pandemic and embrace the innovations to come, we believe that maintaining a focus on developing interconnected systems – around curriculum, family engagement, school culture, and more – must remain a priority for system leaders. Launched in February 2020, the Partnership Playbook outlines how to build these systems within and around schools to accelerate equity for low-income students and students of color.

View the Playbook

Our mission is to transform schools to revolutionize school systems, empowering all students with a high-quality education.

We are implementing a sustainable transformation model across 19 high-need district schools, while influencing large-scale, systemic changes in LA Unified, the state of California, and beyond.

What Makes Us Unique The Partnership is one of the largest, in-district public school transformation organizations in the United States. We are an independent non-profit organization that promotes change through an innovative transformation model: working with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LA Unified) under a Memorandum of Understanding, the Partnership manages a network of district schools in Boyle Heights, South LA, and Watts. Our model relies on sustainable and scalable solutions that can be applied at schools beyond our 19 campuses to dramatically improve outcomes for all students.

Scalable and Sustainable Because the vast majority of our nation’s students still attend traditional public schools, we believe in finding solutions to empower students in the district context. And knowing the limitations of public education funding, we only provide supports that can be scaled to and sustainably funded at other high-need district schools. This allows us to influence broader change by working within and alongside LA Unified to find and share solutions.

Highest-Need Schools We work where the need is greatest. As ranked by the Student Equity Need Index - created through a collaboration between the Advancement Project, Community Coalition, and InnerCity Struggle - that takes a holistic measure of student need by including neighborhood conditions such as poverty, violence and access to resources. Fifteen of 18 Partnership schools are high- or highest-need. Specifically, our network includes Los Angeles’ second, fifth and seventh highest-need elementary schools; the fourth and fifth highest-need middle schools; and fourth highest-need high school.

Systems Change Our experience directly supporting schools uniquely positions us to identify limitations and opportunities within schools and systems. Our systems change work removes barriers to student success while scaling up solutions. A recent example of our work centers around equitable funding for high-need schools. In 2018, through advocacy with our partners, we were instrumental in helping secure approval from LA Unified’s Board of Education for a revised Student Equity Need Index, which now includes indicators that more accurately identify and fund the district’s highest need schools. We also advocated for allocation of approximately $260 million of funds to schools in 2019-20 based on their index ranking. We believe equity-based funding is a critical issue for school districts and we are continuing to advocate for more discretionary funds to be prioritized for our highest-need schools.

Power in Partners The historically underserved schools we manage need an array of supports that extend beyond our work, and we know we cannot achieve our mission on our own. Our success is built by creating strong partnerships and leveraging the expertise of partner organizations, community members, and dozens of funders. Our partners help serve the individual needs of our schools and students by providing social emotional supports, health and wellness care, academic interventions, after-school programming, and much more, ensuring success beyond what we alone can provide.