Opening Up Educational Opportunities Through Network Leadership

(Illustration by Feodora Chiosea)

Public service programs often pose a confusing maze to the people they intend to serve. Agencies often work in isolation, with broken pathways looping back on themselves or leading to dead ends. This fragmentation inadvertently creates barriers to access for their intended beneficiaries. Public health systems purchase vaccines but struggle to reach seniors and underserved populations. Food banks stock up on summer meals but can’t reach hungry children when they’re not in school.

After-school and summer learning time is an important education area plagued by fragmentation. Lower-income students miss out on stimulating and engaging learning opportunities that their more-affluent peers receive. This has important consequences: A Johns Hopkins University study found that the cumulative effects of summer learning loss can account for two-thirds of the academic achievement gap. More recently, McKinsey research found that learning loss due to COVID-19 school closures will widen the academic achievement gap even further; students of color were about three to five months behind in math compared to one to three months for white students.

Now, more than ever, there is a tremendous need to let go of traditional ways of working to deliver greater educational outcomes more efficiently, effectively, and sustainably. Increasing the impact of education and other service delivery networks requires that we adopt new approaches—and we need a new model of leadership to get there. “Network leaders” who put an ambitious mission ahead of their own organizational self-interest are the key. These leaders focus on creating trust-based relationships from the bottom up rather than leading from the top down. They seek to grow the capacity of others and the field more broadly, and by fostering a culture of trust, integrity, and humility, they promote distributed leadership toward a shared mission throughout the network.

Network leaders have quietly catalyzed outsized impact in a wide range of fields, including education. Indeed, a recent partnership between InPlay—a small nonprofit based in San Mateo, California, working to strengthen cities’ out-of-school learning ecosystems—and the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) highlights how the approach can dramatically improve educational access. Specifically, the partnership aims to connect underserved students with high-quality summer and after-school programs. The collaboration offers lessons for other nonprofits seeking to achieve broader, systemic impact through partnership with government and educational institutions.

The Beginnings of InPlay

InPlay was founded in 2014 with a mission to connect underserved students with after-school and summer programs that help them develop their unique interests and talents, with an eye to closing the achievement gap. Co-founders Rod Hsiao (co-author of this article) and Woody Peterson saw that out-of-school program spots didn’t always go to the students who most needed them and scholarship spots often went unused. Community providers struggled with local schools to market and register underserved students for their programs. Teachers and administrators knew these high-priority students were often the hardest to reach but didn’t have the capacity to help.

Districts and their community partners needed new ways to collaborate and connect priority families to out-of-school programs. Together, Hsiao and Peterson developed a mobile activity guide similar to Yelp to help families find out-of-school programs. The guide translated content and listed programs serving lower-income families, kids with special needs, and English learners.

In 2016, they launched the Oakland Activity Guide by collaborating with the school district and leaders in the Oakland Summer Learning Network, which sought to develop a city-wide network of quality summer learning opportunities. The guide listed 889 community programs, and site use grew from 25 to 84 percent of district families over the following five years. But while this success enabled everybody in the network to remain focused on their own programs and old ways of working together, the guide still didn’t help underserved families overcome the cumulative barriers to access they faced—including the digital divide, long registration forms, and demeaning financial-aid paperwork.

A New Kind of Partnership

School closures related to COVID-19 offered a new opportunity to reach the most underserved students exclusively. OUSD saw that its underserved students were exhibiting high absenteeism and falling behind more than other students, and that it needed to enroll them in its summer program to promote learning recovery. Julie McCalmont, the district’s coordinator for expanded learning programs, organized high-quality summer programs before the pandemic, but each year they struggled to fill the program spots with the students who most needed them. Even though the district wanted to prioritize underserved students with multiple risk factors (for example, foster youth, chronically absent or homeless students,  newcomers, and those performing below standard academically), their families tended to be hard to reach, and connecting with them took an enormous amount of staff time. Outreach and registration also required complex coordination and data sharing between school sites and community partners. McCalmont summed up the challenge: “While the majority of the students that attend our district could benefit from a high-quality summer learning program, we needed a way to engage the students with the highest level of need.”

InPlay began working directly with McCalmont to design a new process that would enroll 4,200 priority students. The challenge was significant: OUSD served a total of 34,000 students, and 76 percent were low-income, foster youth, and English learners. McCalmont also needed to coordinate with 74 different school principals and their staff, plus 10 community partners.

Taking on the project also required that InPlay make a major shift in its annual programmatic and organizational goals. It meant collaborating closely with McCalmont and her team to understand and support the school district’s internal workflows and putting their partner’s needs and challenges first. And although OUSD offered to pay for the service, InPlay needed to make a significant additional investment in staff time, software design, and data structuring.

But InPlay also saw the potential to advance its mission, as well as the opportunity to gain access to student data that would allow it to serve the broader ecosystem of community-based programs. Instead of using the “pull” marketing that drew users to its activity guide, InPlay could engage in “push” marketing and present relevant programs directly to targeted families. The new service it envisioned would be a huge improvement over the old ways of doing marketing, outreach, and registration; achieve greater equity by enrolling the students who would most benefit from the programs; complement the strengths and assets of other stakeholders in the summer and after-school learning ecosystem; and make existing workflows more effective and cost-efficient for all.

Launching the New Service

In 2020, the InPlay team designed, built, and tested a new service called Out-of-School Communication and Registration (OSCAR). The service texted priority families on their mobile phones; presented summer programs in simple, clear language; and pre-filled their registration forms using school-district data. Parents and caregivers could read the information in their preferred language and sign up with their mobile phones in less than four minutes.

When the new service rolled out in spring 2021, 90 percent of the students who signed up were priority students, and 88 percent were able to register without needing any outside reminders or assistance. Families gave the sign-up process rave reviews for its simplicity and speed. School staff managed registrations and waitlists centrally and saw their admin workload plummet. After registration was over, despite the bumps and hurdles of initial implementation, school administrators concluded that it provided more managerial control and was a significant improvement over previous methods.

Other Oakland stakeholders also took notice. Recognizing that its grantees struggled to fill seats in their after-school programs, the City of Oakland, which invested $18 million annually in youth programs, worked with OUSD and InPlay to give grantees access to OSCAR for recruitment. Moreover, the city pledged new funding for the original mobile activity guide to serve all families. OUSD also promoted the guide more actively, increasing use to 84 percent of all OUSD families. By complementing the respective strengths and assets of the city, school district, and nonprofit partners, InPlay was able to expand and enhance the effectiveness of the overall out-of-school learning ecosystem while meeting its own mission far more effectively.

The Role of Network Leadership

InPlay’s partnership with OUSD demonstrates the four counterintuitive principles that define network leadership and are essential to a network’s success:

Mission Before Organization: Network leaders seek to maximize mission impact rather than just advance their organizations. By setting aside their preconceived ways of working and engaging in joint learning, InPlay and OUSD focused on a broader, shared mission. Meeting families’ needs quickly and conveniently helped OUSD surpass its summer 2021 enrollment goals and improve efficiency. This same approach—and attitude—can work for a range of organizations, particularly for the countless nonprofits seeking to serve children through school district partnerships.

Trust Not Control: Network members invest in building authentic, trust-based relationships as the foundation for partnership and deeper collaboration. InPlay’s work within the network gave it credibility with OUSD, which in turn shared both its needs and access to student data so that InPlay could build a streamlined solution. Now, a long-time collaboration in planning and joint-funding between OUSD and the City of Oakland Fund for Children and Youth has opened up the opportunity to leverage the OSCAR service and student data to register priority students for the fund’s 70 community partner programs.

Promote Others, Not Yourself: Network leaders habitually promote the work of the network and willingly take a back seat when others are in a better position to lead. InPlay achieved greater mission impact by providing the underlying connectivity or “plumbing” to help program information flow to families of underserved students. This saved time and resources for both parents and school administrators, helped increase equity among families, and supported community programs across the city in meeting their missions and strengthening their financial sustainability. The agencies retain ultimate control and accountability, and now have a more efficient way to promote and fill their programs.

Build Constellations, Not Stars: Network leaders seek to catalyze networks that will collectively generate the desired impact. By strengthening the out-of-school program ecosystem, InPlay is meeting its ultimate mission of connecting underserved students with enriching learning opportunities. Now, as California begins disbursing $4.6 billion in new learning recovery funds, the network InPlay and OUSD have built is attracting the attention of several other school districts and cities that seek to support their community partners, leverage city and school resources and relationships, and promote more equitable access to educational opportunities for underserved students and families. InPlay is now helping develop additional networks around the United States.

We hope other education institutions will be inspired to engage a broader network of stakeholders, identify areas of complementary strengths, and adopt a new mindset that maximizes the collective strength of the whole network to achieve greater public good.

Read more stories by Rod Hsiao & Jane Wei-Skillern.