This report was based on a systematic effort to identify instances of cross-sector collaborations for education and then to gather and analyze information on  their websites.

The scan was developed from a research design that involved the following:

• A working definition of “cross-sector collaboration for education” to clarify what would and would not be included in the scan.
• A progressive strategy for locating collaborations. That first involved searching broadly for collaborations using keywords and identifying initiatives affiliated with major networks of collaborations. Then researchers systematically searched the 100 largest cities and 100 largest school districts in the country.
• A method for obtaining information about each collaboration: Downloading its web pages and related materials at a fixed point of time (January 2015) and converting them into searchable PDF files.
• A strategy for coding the website information to capture a predefined set of descriptive characteristics and record them in a database.
• The use of sorting strategies and numerical analyses to identify patterns in the descriptors across the set of collaborations.

Cross-sector collaborations were place-based. They also were organized and led at the city, school district, and/or county level. At top leadership levels, at least two sectors–education, general-purpose government, and civic–participated. Efforts focused on educational outcomes, with school system officials playing an important role. The search process yielded 182 collaborations with functioning websites.