ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses a reform strategy, and local cross-sector collaboration for education that emanates from some of the same impulses that gave birth to the reform strategies and offers important alternative options, benefits, and potential pitfalls. Interest in cross-sector collaboration as a policy alternative for improvement of educational outcomes has grown in recent years, to at least some degree because of efforts from the philanthropic and social innovation communities to develop and promote a new idea known as "collective impact". In terms of their ability to raise local revenues as distinct from the economic resources of their residents, cities with at least one local cross-sector collaboration have greater relative fiscal capacity than those without. Much of the rhetoric about cross-sector collaboration, especially among those aligned with the collective impact movement, stresses the value of community-based initiatives, organic local networks, and locally developed solutions.