Stronger Together: How Accreditation Strengthens Higher Education and P-12 Partnerships

Partnerships between institutions of higher education (IHEs) and P-12 schools are often discussed in accreditation as something that needs to be documented. But when partnerships are approached primarily as an accreditation requirement, we can lose sight of why they matter in the first place. Strong partnerships are relationships that are built over time, grounded in shared goals, and designed to benefit both institutions and, most importantly, the students and candidates they serve.

The research on school-university collaboration and the partnership expectations embedded within educator preparation accreditation point us in much the same direction. Meaningful partnerships are mutually beneficial, jointly supported, and intentionally designed. They move us beyond simply documenting that a relationship exists toward demonstrating what that relationship actually accomplishes.

When both partners are accountable to accreditation or other quality assurance systems, whether through a regional accreditor such as the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), a national educator preparation accreditor such as the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) or the Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation (AAQEP), or a state agency such as the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), there is also an important opportunity. Rather than viewing these expectations as separate compliance obligations, institutions can identify where they naturally intersect.

The same partnership can provide meaningful evidence across multiple systems while also creating something of genuine value for students. Workforce-relevant coursework, dual credit opportunities, stronger clinical experiences, professional learning, and pathways into the teaching profession are just a few examples. That is where partnership work begins to move beyond compliance.

What the Research Says About Partnership Quality

Research on clinical practice in teacher preparation consistently points to the importance of intentionally connecting fieldwork and coursework. Burroughs and colleagues (2020) describe a continuum that moves from mediated fieldwork, where the university places candidates in schools and largely manages the experience independently, toward co-constructed partnerships in which both institutions share responsibility for design, mentoring, and evaluation.

I find this framework particularly useful because it gives programs a way to honestly consider where their partnerships are today, not simply where they would like them to be. That distinction matters in continuous improvement. We cannot strengthen a partnership until we understand how responsibility, decision-making, and ownership are currently shared.

Professional Development School literature reaches similar conclusions. Practitioner accounts of accredited PDS partnerships, such as Roth, Decker, and Cooner (2019), emphasize the importance of role clarity, shared professional learning, and structures that can survive changes in personnel. Farrell et al. (2024) similarly demonstrate that partnerships built around intentional design, data collection, and joint assessment can produce evidence that is far more useful than partnerships developed primarily around convenient placements.

The National Council on Teacher Quality's crosswalk of its Clinical Practice Framework (2024) with CAEP and AAQEP expectations reinforces this point. Both accreditors address strong district-preparation program partnerships, although they approach different elements in different ways. Accreditation may establish the expectation for partnership, but the quality and usefulness of that partnership ultimately depend on what the partners build together.

Where the Accreditation Expectations Overlap

CAEP Standard 2 focuses on clinical partnerships and practice and asks providers to demonstrate mutually beneficial partnerships, shared responsibility for candidate preparation, and appropriate preparation and support for clinical educators. AAQEP similarly asks providers to demonstrate meaningful engagement with schools and communities and to make a case for program quality that reflects the provider's context, including the ways partnerships contribute to candidate and completer success and program improvement.

On the P-12 side, school and district accreditation and improvement processes commonly include expectations related to stakeholder engagement, college and career readiness, professional learning, and data-informed continuous improvement. These expectations are not identical to those found in educator preparation accreditation, but there are meaningful points of connection.

Consider what happens when we intentionally look for those connections:

• Shared governance: A partnership agreement that includes authentic joint decision-making can support the IHE's expectation for mutually beneficial partnership while also demonstrating meaningful stakeholder engagement for the district.
• Shared professional learning: Co-designed training for mentor teachers and clinical faculty supports the preparation of clinical educators while also contributing to district professional learning.
• Shared data: Candidate performance data, mentor feedback, and evidence of P-12 student learning can become part of the continuous improvement process for both partners.
• Shared pathways: Dual credit and career pathway courses can provide evidence of college and career readiness for schools while supporting enrollment, curricular relevance, workforce development, and community engagement for the IHE.

The goal is not to make one piece of evidence “count” as many times as possible. The goal is to recognize where the work institutions are already doing together can become more intentional, more useful, and more connected.

Workforce-Relevant Courses as Partnership Infrastructure

One practical way to bring these ideas together is through co-designed, workforce-relevant coursework. A P-12 school seeking to strengthen its career pathways might partner with an IHE to offer coursework that carries college credit while addressing an identified workforce need. The IHE can contribute curriculum, faculty expertise, credentialing structures, and assessment design, while the school contributes knowledge of its students and community, instructional expertise, and educators who may ultimately serve as adjunct or dual credit instructors.

Education career pathways, including teaching academies and Grow Your Own programs, offer a particularly promising opportunity for educator preparation programs. High school students can complete introductory education coursework for college credit, participate in supervised classroom experiences, and enter higher education with both credits and a clearer understanding of the profession.

The potential benefit is truly reciprocal. The IHE develops a locally rooted recruitment pipeline. The district builds a longer-term strategy for addressing staffing needs. Students gain access to college-level learning and early exposure to a profession they may not otherwise have considered. And both institutions gain meaningful longitudinal information that can inform future decisions.

This model can also extend well beyond teacher preparation into areas such as health sciences, information technology, skilled trades, early childhood education, and business. What makes these arrangements meaningful from an accreditation perspective is not simply that a course or pathway exists. It is the intentionality behind it: how the curriculum was developed, how instructors are qualified and supported, how learning is assessed, and how both partners examine results and make improvements together.

Designing a Partnership That Produces Evidence

In my experience, the strongest accreditation evidence usually comes from work that institutions are actually using. Partnership evidence is no different. Rather than asking, What documents do we need for accreditation? I encourage programs to begin with a different question: What structures would help this partnership work well, and how will we know whether it is working?

Several practices can help:

• Put the partnership in writing. A memorandum of understanding (MOU) can clarify shared goals, responsibilities, decision-making processes, data-sharing expectations, and timelines for reviewing the partnership.
• Create a standing joint structure. A partnership council or advisory group that meets regularly gives both institutions a consistent place for shared decision-making. Meeting agendas and minutes then become natural evidence of that work.
• Define mutual benefit. Both partners should be able to articulate what they gain from the relationship. If the benefits are primarily flowing in one direction, that may be an opportunity to revisit the partnership.
• Prepare clinical educators together. Co-designed mentor training, shared observation tools, and calibration activities can strengthen the candidate experience while producing useful evidence for both institutions.
• Collect a manageable amount of meaningful data. Candidate performance, mentor feedback, enrollment and completion, pathway persistence, hiring outcomes, and other shared indicators can be powerful when partners agree in advance about what they want to learn from them.
• Close the loop. Perhaps most importantly, document what changed because partners examined the evidence together. One clear example of a decision or improvement resulting from shared data often tells a much stronger story than a large collection of disconnected artifacts.

Common Pitfalls

One of the most common challenges I see in partnership work is one-directional benefit. When an IHE primarily needs clinical placements and the school or district receives little in return, the relationship may continue for years, but it is difficult to describe it as truly mutually beneficial.

Another challenge is what I think of as personality-dependent partnerships. Strong relationships between individuals are incredibly valuable, but when the entire partnership resides with two people, a retirement, promotion, or reassignment can cause years of collaborative work to disappear. Sustainable partnerships need structures that outlast the individuals who helped create them.

Data can present a similar challenge. Programs may collect substantial amounts of information from partners but never create opportunities to examine that information together. Technically, there may be evidence of data collection, but the larger continuous improvement purpose has been missed.

Dual credit and pathway courses bring additional considerations. Instructor qualifications, course equivalency, transferability, and comparable academic rigor need to be considered early. These are accreditation and quality assurance issues, but they are also student issues. Ultimately, students are the ones affected when a course or credit does not carry the value they were promised.

Why This Matters Beyond Compliance

Accreditation expectations around partnership exist because educator preparation cannot, and should not, happen separately from the schools and communities where educators will ultimately work.

When viewed through that lens, the standards are asking for much more than signatures on agreements or evidence that meetings occurred. They are asking whether institutions with different structures, priorities, and responsibilities have found meaningful ways to work together toward outcomes that matter for the students they both serve. And this is where accreditation can become much more useful.

When partnership structures are authentic, the evidence needed for accreditation becomes a natural byproduct of the work. Meeting minutes exist because people are making decisions together. Data exist because partners are trying to understand whether something is working. Changes are documented because the partnership is continuously improving. That is the difference between collecting evidence for accreditation and having meaningful work that naturally produces accreditation evidence. For me, that is what moving beyond compliance is really about.

Point to Ponder

If your closest P-12 partner were asked, without you in the room, to describe what they gain from working with your program, would their answer match yours?

If you decided to build a workforce-relevant course or pathway together next year, who from each institution would need to be at the table from the very beginning?

References

• Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation. (2022). AAQEP Expectations Framework.
• Burroughs, G., Lewis, A., Battey, D., Curran, M., Hyland, N. E., & Ryan, S. (2020). From mediated fieldwork to co-constructed partnerships: A framework for guiding and reflecting on P-12 school–university partnerships. Journal of Teacher Education, 71(1), 122–134.
• Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. (2024). Resources: Standard R2, Clinical Partnerships and Practice.
• Farrell, C. C., Penuel, W. R., Arce-Trigatti, P., Soland, J., Singleton, C., Resnick, A. F., Stamatis, K., Riedy, R., Henrick, E., Sexton, S., Wellberg, S., & Schmidt, D. (2024). Designing measures of complex collaborations with participatory, evidence-centered design. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 9, 1210547.
• National Council on Teacher Quality. (2024). NCTQ's Clinical Practice Framework: Crosswalk with expectations for accreditation (CAEP and AAQEP).
• Roth, J. J., Decker, D., & Cooner, D. D. (2019). Practitioner experiences in teacher education partnerships: Examining practice in an accredited professional development school. Journal of Practitioner Research, 4(2).