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This chapter highlights the lessons learned in the more than 10-year partnership between the University of California, Berkeley and Aspire Public Schools to create and sustain California College Preparatory Academy (CAL Prep), a high-expectation and early college secondary school for first-generation college students. The chapter also assesses the successes and challenges faced in this collaborative journey; the generalizability of findings to other contexts; and implications for practice, policy, and research. CAL Prep continued to improve—reaching the hearts and minds of students and providing an aligned, responsive pathway to college readiness. The capacity to innovate rested on investments in this boundary-crossing partnership, a culture-challenging mindset, multilayered learning communities, and a time-intensive as well as focused planning process. Mutual benefits across the secondary–tertiary divide included changes in university supports for first-generation college students, the valuing of public scholarship, and a recognized need for change in professional training programs.

This chapter provides the context that made a university role in comprehensive secondary reform a vital imperative for the University of California, Berkeley and sets the stage for a partnership with Aspire Public Schools to open the California College Preparatory Academy. This context includes the demise of affirmative action in college admissions, the leaky academic pipeline of low-income students and students of color, and a mandate to rethink secondary school design for both equity and excellence. The chapter also describes the need for a longitudinal case study of partnered new school development. Reflecting findings from public scholarship and diverse voices, this book covers the beginnings of the partnership and the school, collaborative research examples that informed school development, practitioner knowledge about achieving equity and excellence in a high school, and lessons learned about how to prepare all students to be ready for college and successful once there.

This chapter provides reflections on the development of the partnership from the charter school district perspective—as written by two superintendents of the Aspire school district, both of whom served as supervisors of the California College Preparatory Academy (CAL Prep) principals and representatives of Aspire Public Schools. The chapter highlights differences in organizational culture, the ways in which parallel work became intertwined effort, emerging strains, and the benefits to collaborators on both sides of the secondary–tertiary education divide. Among many institutional differences, it could be said that while Aspire was playing Pac Man, the University of California (UC) Berkeley was playing chess, and while UC Berkeley focused on CAL Prep as a model school, Aspire focused on becoming a model district. Yet all perspectives were needed to meet the challenges that lay ahead because educating underserved students proved not to be for the faint of heart.

This chapter provides a rich picture of the first year of the California College Preparatory Academy and its normative growing pains. Life on the ground proved far from the rosy educational vision that had been debated in joint planning. Among the challenges described are the underpreparedness of the students, the pushback from students and their families to the academic rigor required by the school faculty, the pressure on a small school faculty, and the funding shortfalls associated with a small school dependent on state funding from average daily attendance. Narrative records of the meetings highlight how the partnership worked to harness and integrate resources from the university and the district, supplement funding with philanthropy, enrich the program offerings and teacher professional development, and mount community-engaged and relevant scholarship.