The Worcester Education Collaborative’s mission is “to engage our community in fulfilling its responsibility to ensure that excellence in education is available to all public school students and that they are prepared for success in college, career, and life.”

Our mission is supported by our theory of action–a sound reform agenda coupled with meaningful community engagement and support will result in sustained educational improvement.  The vision articulated by the leadership of the Worcester Public Schools, that all children can learn and meet high expectations along with the passage of our state’s important Act to Address the Achievement Gap offer unprecedented opportunities for improvement in our district.  The Collaborative is working with all parties with a vested interest in the education of our children to capture these opportunities.

Our strategy is informed by both our mission and our theory of action.  At the root of  our daily, ongoing work is the belief in the importance of collective impact through aligned action and shared goals. We believe that to accomplish our work we must, as a community align our actions in service of teaching, learning, and school improvement, and that we must make systemic and structural changes in the institutions, both public and private, delivering services to students enrolled in our publicly funded schools.  As the only organization of its kind in our city, Worcester Education Collaborative has taken a leadership role in these areas.

The work of alignment and coordination is critical to school improvement in Worcester. We have dozens of organizations and businesses engaged with students during or after school, all, to borrow a phrase, “rowing madly, but not in the same direction”.  The intentional, steady, and impartial work of alignment, accomplished through the WEC led Education Roundtable will lead to more efficient delivery of services with more robust outcomes.  This approach, one focusing on cross-agency, cross-sector collaboration to yield large scale change has been identified as a best practice and is groundbreaking for our community.

The portion of the Collaborative’s portfolio of work toward effectuating systemic and structural change is accomplished both through our programming and through the less public work of developing relationships and lending expertise and authority in a range of venues.  As a result of our efforts we are seeing significant movement toward a shared vision of education, increased collaboration among critical stakeholders, better informed parents, and a greater alignment among the community, businesses and corporations, and other entities.