While the “education wars” dominate media coverage of school reform debates, largely unnoticed research is mounting that student outcomes are strongest in districts pursuing intensive collaboration among teachers and administrators—the  inverse of the conflicts that attract so much attention.

In this excerpt from my new e-book, Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, I look at the case of Springfield, Massachusetts. Its once-struggling public schools have seen modest but significant improvements in its standardized test scores—gains that have come in the wake of a joint labor-management initiative that radically transformed the culture of its teachers and administrators.

Read on for details. You can download the first chapter of Beyond the Education Wars for free, or purchase the full e-book from Amazon or iTunes.