426 The Secret Partnership Design Schools Need

If your idea of “partnerships” is guest speakers and career fairs… you’re playing small.

In this episode of the Disrupt Education Podcast, Peter Hostrawser and Alli Dahl unpack the uncomfortable truth: partnerships don’t scale by hope — they scale by design. And if districts want real work-based learning, internships, and community-connected pathways, they can’t keep treating partnerships like a PR checkbox.

This conversation ties together the “boundary spanning” framework from Chris Brida’s work and turns it into a practical leadership lens: how do we fund, staff, protect, and scale programs so they outlive one superhero leader? How do we rebuild trust when education has broken promises to industry? And what does it actually take to shift from event-based partnerships to real outcome-based systems?

You’ll hear why naming your program matters (because what’s named can be funded), how trust is built through consistent design, and why schools that refuse to staff partnership work don’t really want partnerships — they want optics.

And yes… Alli brings a chicken into the episode to prove the point: you don’t get “cuddly chickens” unless you’re willing to get in the coop and do the work.

In this episode:

Why most school partnerships fail (and how to fix it)Partnership design vs. partnership “events”Funding + staffing + scaling programs through clear namingRebuilding trust with industry and community partnersBoundary spanning as the missing leadership frameworkThe chicken coop metaphor you won’t forget

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