The past two decades have been times of heightened emphasis on changing structures between universities and public schools toward collaboration as a means of improving the education and preparation of pre-service and in-service teachers. Numerous studies have found that students in teacher education courses often have difficulty utilizing the "mastered" knowledge when planning and implementing instruction in their own classrooms. The response has been a call for improved pre-service teacher education by focusing attention on programs, which connect public school and university experiences. This article analyzes two of the organizational conditions that appear to enable partnership develop genuine collaboration--organic collaboration. It uses findings from earlier studies of an established collaborative university/public school partnership in North East Texas. The initial partnership was formed in the spring of 1991 when three public school districts and a regional university collaborated to write a grant proposal in response to the Texas Legislature's designation of funds for the formation of professional development centers comprised of partnerships between public schools and universities. Furthermore, this article uses the structural, political, and cultural perspectives of organizations to analyze the conditions or behaviors that appear to exist in the center in which organic collaboration is present. Each perspective is described with attendant features found in the collaborative partnerships.