Talk about Collaborative Governance in Education at UC Santa Cruz

A few days after presenting at CIES 2026 in San Francisco, on April 2, 2026, Antoni Verger brought the team’s comparative research—conducted with Delfina Campetella, Edgar Quilabert, Mauro C. Moschetti, and Marcel Pagès—to the Education Department at UC Santa Cruz.

In the discussion-oriented seminar, “School Collaboration in the New Public Governance Era: A Systematic Case Review,” Verger presented the study to colleagues working on education governance in the United States. The exchange with Rene Espinoza Kissell was particularly productive. She presented her analysis of comparable models in California and discussed the challenges of implementing them in a context increasingly shaped by market-oriented dynamics.

Seven cases, four main lessons

Verger mapped the international cases along two dimensions: breadth, referring to the number of policy and organizational domains governed by the intermediate structure, and intensity, referring to the degree of autonomy with which it exercises that authority.

The cases were grouped into three clusters. Structured collaboration, found in Manchester, Quebec, and the early stages of Chile’s reform, displayed the strongest coordination capacity. Soft alignment, represented by New Zealand, Portugal, and France, focused primarily on building professional and organizational capacity, although with uneven outcomes. Weakly structured collaboration, illustrated by Flanders and England’s Education Action Zones, had more limited influence over schools’ core practices.

The comparative analysis yielded four main lessons. First, collaboration becomes consequential only when it is supported by genuine authority and sufficient organizational capacity. Second, scale should be treated as a central governance lever when designing collaborative arrangements. Third, the role of the middle tier is to govern interdependence across schools and institutions, rather than necessarily to centralize pedagogical decision-making. Finally, accountability arrangements must be redesigned alongside collaboration; otherwise, existing accountability pressures may undermine the very forms of cooperation these reforms seek to promote.