Once that neighborhood was restored, the Corridor Initiative could then be replicated throughout the other communities of the borough. This slogan captures the Bronx Alliance's comprehensive efforts to link school reform with health care and other needed services to students and their families to promote the well-being of the entire community. Other UPP partnerships have developed distinctive visions as well. The Queens Urban Partnership's concentration on student language development, which unifies the team's work in a number of schools, is a response to the borough's high rate of immigration, which has filled the schools with children from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds speaking many different languages. The San Juan Alianza promotes a vision of a more participatory and democratic school culture through the development of mini-internships for teachers and school administrators that supports dialogue and mutual reflection among teachers.
Leadership is critical.
It takes many forms and is exercised at many levels within emerging collaboratives. For instance, some of the UPP partnerships have very involved executive committees, while others have large and active operating committees. All of the UPP collaboratives provide a wide range of opportunities for teachers, counselors, administrators, parents, government officials, and community residents to exercise leadership and influence the development of reform initiatives. To understand the leadership challenge, it is important to recognize that, in the American educational system, no single institution has responsibility for the success of children. As the UPP teams develop, they are learning to create new forms of leadership that permits organizations to act together across all educational sectors.