"Collective impact," a model that champions cross-sectoral collaborations as a way to drive progress toward social goals, is beginning to inform education reform efforts across the United States, a report from the Wallace Foundation and Columbia University Teachers College finds. The report, Collective Impact and the New Generation of Cross-Sector Collaborations for Education: A Nationwide Scan (56 pages, PDF), examined nearly two hundred place-based, multi-sectoral, educational collaborations — those involving at least two levels of educational institutions, local or regional government agencies, and the nonprofit, philanthropic, and/or business sectors — and found that fifty-eight of the hundred largest cities in the U.S. were home to at least one such initiative. The report also found that cities where the model had been adopted tended to have higher levels of poverty, larger racial income inequality gaps, and bigger fiscal funding gaps than cities where the approach had not yet been tried; that the number of collective impact efforts nationwide is growing; and that the sectors most often represented on collective impact boards in the education area are business (91 percent) and school districts (91 percent), followed by higher education (87 percent) and social service agencies (79 percent),while teachers unions were represented on only 12 percent of the boards examined.