Improving Education Together ― A Guide to Labor-management-community Collaboration

Improving Education Together offers a step-by-step guide to Labor-Management-Community (LMC) collaboration, an intervention that has successfully improved student outcomes in a wide variety of school districts across the country. The authors illustrate how a culture of collaboration between labor, management, and community stakeholders can be built using readily available tools for needs assessment, root-cause analysis, team norms, brainstorming, consensus-building, and long-term planning.

Improving Education Together offers detailed examples of how districts across the country—including Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois—have successfully implemented the LMC approach, along with resources and strategies employed and lessons learned from obstacles and setbacks encountered along the way.

Timely, useful, and accessible, this guide will appeal to a broad audience of school leaders, board members, and community leaders eager to learn more about how to collectively lead and manage school district change that is sustainable and results in improved teaching and learning.

Geoff Marietta is the executive director of Pine Mountain Settlement School and a research fellow at Berea College. Chad d’Entremont is the executive director of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy. Emily Murphy Kaur is the director of the Massachusetts Education Partnership at the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy.