University-school-community partnerships represent a collaborative model of urban educational reformation inclusive of all the organizations that impact urban education. Co-constructed relationships among communities, schools, and universities have the potential for redistributing hierarchical power, thereby enabling all partners to contribute to a new cultural model capable of transforming K-12 urban schools. This study examines the first year of formation of one co-constructed university-school-community partnership that attempted to transform the cultural model of one urban high school.

This study explores the potential of a partnership that employs co-construction, dialogue, and mutually shared learning as partnering processes intended to redistribute power among the members of its different stakeholder groups. This researcher identified history, hierarchy, and an absence of systems and structures within the partnership as barriers to the seamless partnering of the different organizations represented in this partnership. This researcher identifies history, space for dialogue, and a critical-bridge person as elements helpful to members of the partnership in their efforts to overcome these barriers. In addition, the researchers found that the co-construction processes employed by the partnership revealed emergent stages of a new cultural model within the urban high school. This new cultural model is characterized by emergent levels of distributed leadership, trust, and collaborative power relationships.