Rarely does a day go by at ICW when we aren’t asked for best practices or examples of the business community diving into education reform, usually regarding a specific education issue. It’s not always as straightforward a question as it seems, and frankly, it’s one we often hesitate to answer. We know that what works in one community may not work somewhere else, as the various moving parts, differing governance structures, and level of political will involved all differ from place to place.

But ultimately, the problem with putting forward best practices is that people often take the wrong lessons away when they glance at a successful education reform program. By the time we—the public—catch wind of an initiative, we only see the smiling faces, the songs of unity, and the fantastic results. What most of us don’t get to see is the blood, sweat, and tears that went into forming those partnerships, the arguments that took place at its inception, and the enormous challenges that were overcome along the way. As such, best practices typically present a rather skewed insight that is often entirely unhelpful when trying to replicate that success in other places.

Rather than producing a series of broad best practices that would likely fall short of truly assisting business leaders, ICW decided to take a closer look at a few effective business champions for education reform to find out what made them tick. We enlisted Rick Hess and Whitney Downs of the American Enterprise Institute to do case studies of three very different “best practices” and truly investigate what obstacles had to be dealt with in order to find success. They conducted interviews of the players involved in the efforts of the Austin (TX) Chamber of Commerce in their “20,010 by 2010” initiative to increase college enrollment in the region, the work done by the Ford Motor Company Fund in helping to redesign the Nashville Public School system, and the labors of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education in leading their state to adopt the Common Core standards.

Hess and Downs uncovered the story behind the glory, and in doing so, found many common themes and lessons learned among the three very different efforts. You can read about their findings in our new report, Partnership is a Two-Way Street: What it Takes for Business to Help Drive School Reform, which releases today. We at ICW hope that corporate and chamber of commerce leaders across the country will employ some of these strategies as they undertake the important task of improving their local education systems.