Collaborative Action for Equity and Opportunity: A Practical Guide for School and Community Leaders

Collaborative Action for Equity and Opportunity provides a how-to guide for education, government, and community leaders interested in creating cross-sector systems of support for students. These collaborations strive to close achievement and opportunity gaps and to help children overcome problems stemming from poverty, racism, and other societal ills.

Based on a framework developed at Harvard’s By All Means Initiative, Paul Reville and Lynne Sacks walk readers through the process of jump-starting a successful collaboration between school, government, and community leaders. The authors describe how to form a local Children’s Cabinet to lead the effort, identify goals and strategies, and ensure the long-term sustainability of the collaboration.

In addition to a clear sequential set of implementation steps, Reville and Sacks provide field-tested tools, examples of communities that have undertaken this work, and specific strategies and guidance gleaned from their collaborations with more than thirty communities across the country.

Collaborative Action for Equity and Opportunity highlights the roles that school and municipal leaders play in creating comprehensive systems of support and opportunity for all children in a community.

Paul Reville is the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where he has been a faculty member since 1997. He is the founding director of HGSE’s Education Redesign Lab. Reville served as secretary of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 2008 to 2013. His career, spanning more than four decades, has combined research, policy, and practice focused on educational equity and reform in Massachusetts and the nation. He has been a top policy maker, a teacher, a principal, and the founder of a research center and several other organizations devoted to education equity and reform.

During his service as the secretary of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and as Governor Patrick’s top education adviser, Reville established a new Executive Office of Education and had oversight of higher education, K–12, and early education in the nation’s leading student achievement state. He served in the governor’s cabinet and played a leading role on matters ranging from the Achievement Gap Act of 2010 and Common Core State Standards to the commonwealth’s highly successful Race to the Top proposal. Before joining the Patrick administration, Reville had chaired the Massachusetts State Board of Education, founded the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, cofounded the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE), chaired the Massachusetts Reform Review Commission, chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Time and Learning, and served as executive director of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform, a national think tank that convened leading US researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to set the national standards agenda. Reville played a central role in MBAE’s development of, and advocacy for, the Massachusetts historic Education Reform Act of 1993.

Reville began his career with service as a VISTA volunteer and youth worker. He worked as a teacher and principal of two urban alternative high schools. He founded a local education foundation, which was part of the Public Education Network, where he also served as a member of the national board. He has recently served as cochair of the national Broader, Bolder Approach to Education initiative. He is currently a board member of, and adviser to, a host of organizations such as City Year Boston, BELLXcel, Bellwether, Boston After School and Beyond, the Rennie Center, and Harvard Medical School’s MEDscience program. He is a frequent writer, commentator, and speaker on education reform and policy issues. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College, a master’s degree from Stanford University, and five honorary doctorate degrees.

Additionally, Reville is the regular education commentator for WGBH’s Boston Public Radio. He frequently contributes to Education Week, the Boston Globe, The 74 Million, and other publications. He has recently written for the Times Education Supplement, Nature Human Behaviour, and the publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He co-edited the book A Decade of Urban School Reform: Persistence and Progress in the Boston Public Schools. He co-wrote, with Elaine Weiss, the book Broader, Bolder, Better: How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty.

Lynne Sacks is the research director at the Education Redesign Lab and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She leads EdRedesign’s research activities, including the ongoing By All Means research as well as EdRedesign’s other research, and teaches a graduate course on qualitative evaluation. Her publications include Building Citywide Systems of Opportunity for Children, Sustaining Cross-Sector Systems of Opportunity for Children, “Equity and Personalized Learning: A Research Review,” and the Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “Sustaining Collaborative Action,” which she coauthored with Paul Reville.

Before joining EdRedesign, Sacks worked for the Center for Equity and Excellence in Education at the George Washington University and the National Center on Education and the Economy on improving the school-to-work transition, benchmarking the US system against other countries, and improving programs for English learners. She has conducted research for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the American Institutes for Research; she has also served as a consultant to New Profit, the Annenberg Center for School Reform, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education, and the Commonwealth Corporation. A former English and English as a Second Language teacher, she earned her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her MEd and EdD degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.