For ten years, veteran education reformer Kathleen Porter-Magee led Partnership Schools, an independent charter-like management organization that ran Catholic schools on behalf of the archdiocese of New York and, currently, Cleveland. She recently announced that she was stepping down as Superintendent to become Managing Partner of the Leadership Roundtable, an organization of lay, religious, and ordained leaders that promotes best practices and accountability in the management and operations of Catholic institutions throughout the U.S. In this exit interview, Porter-Magee discusses the lessons she learned leading the Partnership, including how to build consensus for change and the need for institutions to manage change from “the inside-out,” as well as “outside-in.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve had a terrific run leading the Partnership. Why leave now?
The average urban superintendent stays three years and I had just finished my third three-year term when I listened to a presentation from someone who had just taken over a nonprofit from a founding leader. She stopped and said, “If there are any founding leaders in the group, my strong advice to you is: don’t stay longer than ten years. After ten years, the work becomes more about you than the organization.” That really stuck with me.
Founding leaders are different in so many different ways from the caretaking leaders that you need to see the work through in a second phase. And so, in my tenth year, I said, “This is the right time for me to step away.”
OK, but the reason I asked is because you’re getting out just when it’s getting good for Catholic schools and private schools in general. I’d be looking at what’s going on in states with universal ESAs and thinking, “Families can use public dollars to enroll in my school!”
I’ve always been optimistic about Catholic schools! But, yes, over the past few years, Catholic schools have really stood apart and reminded people just how important they are to our communities. But I’m also leaving at what I think is a great time to take the lessons we’ve learned from Catholic school management and bring them to a larger mission. More specifically, as I reflect on the work the Partnership has done for the past ten years, it’s been an “outside-in” approach to change. That is, we’re driving change in Catholic schools without sitting in the diocesan Catholic schools office—we sat adjacent to the diocese. That “outside-in” relationship helped us look at things differently. It gave us a different perspective and allowed us to innovate in ways that would have been more challenging from the inside. But one of the lessons I’ve learned over the past decade is that, while an outside-in strategy can help initiate change, it’s essential to pair that innovation with an “inside-out” capacity-building strategy to ensure that lessons of reform are enduring.
Say more about the differences between the two, or how they’re complimentary.
There are two ways to drive change in established, often highly centralized or bureaucratic institutions—outside-in or inside-out. Outside-in change often is needed to initiate reform because large, established organizations are slow to change themselves. This kind of change involves people perceived as outsiders working often on the fringes of an institution or in small pockets to innovate, to raise alarms about problems, and to push for doing things differently. But inside-out change is essential to institutionalize reform. Leaders on the inside can change institutional culture and build or shift the systems and structures that make changes enduring. Inside-out change helps ensure that the benefits of innovation aren’t fleeting and wiped out by new leadership. In the early days, organizations like Teach For America started as outside-in, but then they were like, “We actually want to be seeding and cultivating leaders who have positions of power and authority from the inside-out.” Now that we have some outside-in models for change, what does it look like to support diocese and parishes from the inside-out?
At the same time you announced your departure, the New York archdiocese said it would resume control of the schools the Partnership was running. What should we make of that?
Correlation isn't causation! But I was deeply disappointed by the news. Partnership Schools had an eleven-year services agreement with the Archdiocese of New York, and we had been in active conversations to renew for many months. And I think everyone expected the contract to continue, on roughly the same terms, for another term. Unfortunately, in spite of good faith efforts on both sides, the negotiations broke down and the Archdiocese made the decision to bring the seven schools back into the fold. I will say, the timing of the decision has affected my thinking about the importance of institutionalizing reform and has helped me see clearly the importance of working to ensure that the changes that are initiated from the outside do get institutionalized in a meaningful way to ensure long-term sustainability.
You called me ten years ago when you were offered this job. I remember thinking, “Wow, Catholic education? That’s brave.” It was probably the nadir for Catholic schools.
If it was in the nadir, then that means we’re now at the beginning of a renaissance. And I’ve been proud to be part of that shift. I believe very strongly in the power and potential of urban Catholic schools, which were in so many ways the catalyst for the whole education reform movement. I grew up in the archdiocese of New York and went to Catholic schools in the 1980s. And I remember so clearly John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York at the time, constantly sort of needling the UFT, agitating for vouchers, and saying “pick the 10 percent of your most challenging students and send them to our Catholic schools, and we will do it better and we will do it for less.” I loved that era of Catholic school hubris, which still speaks to me. And obviously the reform movement that followed, starting in the early nineties, was great for so many reasons. And while it may have led to some of the decline we’ve seen in Catholic schools, I have believed my entire career that the strength—the hubris and the foundational strength that O’Connor was talking about in the 80s—still courses through the culture of urban Catholic schools. We just need to unleash it.
You and I have always been kindred souls on curriculum. When you first started, I know you had to do some evangelical work, no pun intended, to change literacy instruction in Partnership Schools. Can you talk about that challenge?
When I was talking with the folks at the Partnership about coming on board, Jill Kafka, the executive director, asked me a great question. She asked, “Is there any decision that we’ve made so far that would make it hard for you to say yes to this job?” And I said, “Yes. I don’t support the reading curriculum you’ve chosen and I want to change it.” They had already purchased all the textbooks and even launched summer training. But the Board supported my decision to undo the curriculum decision. And so that summer I met with the principals and evangelized for CKLA [Core Knowledge Language Arts]. I explained why I thought it was the right approach to teaching reading and why I was so passionate about it. And all six principals, who had just launched summer PD with a different program, agreed to take a leap of faith with me and pivot with only weeks before the start of school.
This is why I love working in Catholic schools. We had a scrappy start-up mindset and the flexibility we needed to pivot and adapt quickly. And we had deeply faith-filled, optimistic, troublemaking leaders who were willing to take bold leaps with us.
They got on board or you got them on board? Let’s be really clear.
I drove the bus and they jumped on. But it didn’t feel really heavy-handed. The six principals who led Partnership Schools when I started were amazing. I credit so much of our success to the teachers and leaders who had been working at our six flagship schools when we began. They were badass. One of our legendary principals was a leader by the name of Marianne Kraft. She had been working at St. Athanasius in Hunts Point in the Bronx for more than forty-five years before she finally retired. She was literally there when the Bronx was burning. So changing curriculum at the eleventh hour didn’t feel like a challenge compared to what she had seen before. If it was the right thing to do. She was all-in. The same was true of Sr. Patrice Owens, Abigail Akkano, Joanne Walsh, and so many other teachers and leaders across the schools. These were educators who had seen so much and weathered so many storms—but they were so deeply committed to the prospect of turning their schools around and saving them from closure.
So, I guess I got them on board in the sense that I did two things: First, I showed them that I deeply loved their schools and their communities—because I don’t think you can lead something if you don’t love it. And second, I said, “I think if we do this together, we can change the trajectory of the schools.” And they were all in.
Talk about what you’re going to be doing next.
Sure. I recently took over as managing partner of the Leadership Roundtable, which is an organization dedicated to strengthening the Catholic institutions that support our faith, our ministry, and our communities. One way to think about it is that the Leadership Roundtable does for parishes and dioceses some very similar things to what the Partnership does for schools. It brings together diverse groups of lay, religious, and ordained church leaders to bring operational, managerial, and financial best practices to Catholic institutions.
But more than that, I think about the work of the Leadership Roundtable as the work of institutional renewal. I recently read Yuval Levin’s book, A Time To Build and believe so strongly in the importance of revitalizing our civic institutions—in this case Church institutions—to better bring communities together and support those in need. The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of social services in the country. Each year, more than 100 million people depend on the Church for health care, food, education, housing, disaster relief, and more through a distributed network of Church institutions and nonprofit organizations. Unfortunately, a combination of the decline in institutional trust we have seen across all sectors coupled with the crises the Church has faced in the past twenty years has contributed to a widespread loss of faith and trust. And the Leadership Roundtable works to support the leaders who are working to build a thriving Catholic Church.
