EduCon 2027

Grounded in Angelo Patri’s seminal 1917 vision in A Schoolmaster of the Great City—which insisted that urban schools must weave themselves into the social fabric of their surrounding communities—this workshop examines the modern challenge of building school-community ecosystems. Today’s educators face increasing demands to connect students to rich webs of relationships, yet managing sustainable employer partnerships for experiential and work-based learning remains an operational and relational bottleneck.

Drawing on the practical leadership of PENCIL in New York City, this session explores how intermediary organizations engage business communities to unlock hands-on opportunities for public school students. Participants will apply principles of complexity science to analyze how organic, localized school-employer relationships can evolve into scalable systems without losing their adaptive responsiveness.

Crucially, the conversation incorporates Alvin Roth’s economic descriptions of preference-based matching markets to interrogate the dynamics that ultimately dictate who gets what opportunities and why. By framing work-based learning as a matching market rife with search frictions, information asymmetries, and congestion, we will examine how market design influences access, equity, and student mobility.