Schools increasingly embrace partnership language—partnerships with community organizations, Indigenous communities, businesses, families, and service providers. These partnerships promise collaboration, shared resources, and mutual benefit. Yet partnership rhetoric can obscure power imbalances, paper over historical harms, and enable extraction disguised as collaboration. Genuine partnership requires truth-telling about what's happened before, who holds power now, and what authentic collaboration actually requires. Without this truth-telling, "partnership" becomes another word for relationships that serve institutional interests while exploiting community resources.
The Appeal of Partnership
Partnership language has proliferated in educational discourse. Schools announce partnerships with local businesses, service agencies, and community organizations. Boards pursue partnerships with Indigenous nations. Districts partner with universities, non-profits, and government agencies. The language suggests mutual benefit, collaboration, and shared purpose.
Real benefits can come from genuine partnerships. Schools gain resources, expertise, and connections they couldn't generate alone. Partners gain access to students, venues, and community relationships. Shared projects achieve more than either party could independently. When partnerships work well, they multiply impact for all involved.
Partnership language also serves institutional interests regardless of actual relationships. It signals openness and progressiveness. It can deflect criticism by pointing to community relationships. It can access resources available for partnership but not solo institutional efforts. These benefits accrue to institutions whether or not partnerships are genuinely mutual.
When Partnership Isn't
Power imbalances often characterize what gets called partnership. When schools approach community organizations, schools typically hold more institutional power, resources, and stability. When boards seek partnerships with Indigenous communities, massive power differentials reflect colonial history and ongoing dispossession. Calling these relationships partnerships doesn't make them equal.
Extraction can masquerade as partnership. Schools may seek community resources—volunteers, knowledge, connections, credibility—without offering equivalent return. They may claim partnership while taking what they need and providing little back. True partnership involves reciprocity; extraction is something else whatever it's called.
Tokenism passes for partnership when institutions include community members without giving them real voice. Advisory committees with no authority, consultations whose outcomes are predetermined, and representation without influence aren't partnership—they're partnership theatre that serves institutional image while providing community nothing.
Convenience partnerships engage communities when institutions need something, then disengage when needs are met. Communities that respond to institutional requests for partnership find institutions absent when community needs call for response. Partnership of convenience serves institutional timelines and priorities, not mutual relationship.
Historical Truths That Must Be Faced
In Indigenous contexts, partnership requires confronting residential schools, child welfare removal, and ongoing educational colonialism. Canadian school systems were tools of cultural genocide; this isn't ancient history but living memory for many Indigenous people. Claims of partnership without acknowledging and addressing this history are false. Indigenous communities have every reason to distrust educational institutions approaching them as partners.
Racialized communities have histories with schools that include segregation, streaming, differential discipline, and systematic underservice. Partnership with these communities requires acknowledging how schools have failed them, not just announcing fresh starts as if the past didn't happen. Communities remember what institutions may prefer to forget.
Low-income communities have experienced schools as institutions that blame families for systemic failures, that devalue community knowledge, and that serve advantaged students while writing off those with less. Partnership claims ring hollow to communities that have experienced these patterns.
Families with children with disabilities have often fought schools for services their children are entitled to. Schools that denied, delayed, and fought accommodations can't easily pivot to partnership language without addressing adversarial histories.
What Truth-Telling Requires
Institutional acknowledgment of past harms starts truth-telling. Not general acknowledgment that bad things happened somewhere, but specific recognition of how this institution participated in harming this community. This specificity is uncomfortable but necessary for genuine relationship.
Listening to community accounts rather than defending institutional narratives centres community experience. Institutions telling their own stories of past challenges they've overcome differ from communities telling their stories of harm experienced. Whose story is centred matters.
Current practice examination assesses whether harmful patterns continue. Past harm matters, but ongoing harm matters more. If current practices still disadvantage communities with whom institutions seek partnership, addressing current practice is prerequisite to genuine collaboration.
Power acknowledgment names who has it. Pretending power is equally distributed when it isn't enables those with power to maintain it while performing equality. Honest acknowledgment of power differentials is necessary for addressing them.
Building Toward Genuine Partnership
Time is required to build trust. Relationships damaged over generations aren't repaired through announcements. Institutions must demonstrate changed behaviour consistently over time before communities have reason to trust partnership overtures. Impatience with this timeline reflects institutional priorities over community readiness.
Community leadership in defining partnership terms reflects genuine collaboration. If institutions define what partnership means, they're still controlling relationships. Communities should have authority to set conditions, pace, and scope of partnership—including declining partnership if they choose.
Resource transfer addresses power imbalances. If institutions have more resources than communities, genuine partnership might involve transferring resources rather than merely collaborating. This might mean funding community organizations, providing facilities without strings, or supporting community capacity that institutions then don't control.
Accountability mechanisms ensure partnership commitments are kept. If partnership agreements lack enforcement, they're aspirational statements institutions can abandon when convenient. Accountability—defined by communities, not institutions—makes partnership commitments meaningful.
Ongoing relationship rather than project-specific partnership builds lasting collaboration. Partnerships that form for specific purposes, achieve institutional goals, then dissolve don't build the ongoing relationships genuine partnership requires. Commitment to relationship beyond immediate projects demonstrates sincerity.
Indigenous Education Contexts
Partnership in Indigenous education requires particular attention given colonial history. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action provide framework for educational relationships, but implementation varies from genuine commitment to superficial response. Communities assess institutional sincerity based on actions, not statements.
Indigenous self-determination in education goes beyond partnership. Partnership with colonial institutions isn't the only or necessarily best model for Indigenous education. Indigenous-controlled education—where institutions are Indigenous-governed, not just partnering—may better serve community needs than partnership with institutions that remain colonially structured.
Different Indigenous communities have different needs and preferences. Some seek partnerships with mainstream educational institutions; others prioritize Indigenous alternatives; others pursue various combinations. Institutions shouldn't assume what communities want but should follow community leadership on appropriate relationships.
Questions for Reflection
What partnerships exist between schools and communities in your area? Do they seem genuinely mutual, or do power imbalances characterize them?
What truths about history and current practice would need to be addressed for genuine partnership between your local schools and various communities?
Have you experienced or observed partnership rhetoric that didn't match partnership reality? What characterized these situations?
What would genuine partnership between schools and marginalized communities actually require? How far is current practice from that standard?
How should communities assess whether institutional partnership overtures are genuine? What would demonstrate trustworthiness?