Educational partnership situations where home, school, and community collaborate to produce educational achievement, with shared initiative and responsibilities, are the subject of this report. The origins and evolution of educational partnerships and their relation to other types of participation are outlined. Partnership is then discussed as an action strategy--how it permits broad participation, bridges divergent interests, taps current interest in academic achievement, responds to fiscal constraints, and links with new interest in family and community. Next, partnership is viewed as a conceptual framework--for explaining past failures, providing a map for action, dealing with the ideological challenge to public education, and developing new policies. After this discussion, partnership's relation to the following reform strategies is detailed: school-based planning, outcome-based learning, school effectiveness, community education and community schools, decentralization, and participation in collective bargaining. Then partnership in action is considered with descriptions of its role in early childhood education, its relation to the changing rhetoric of educational reform, local school system partnership actions, rural programs, State support for partnership, Federal action, and support for partnership action by intermediary organizations and networks and coalitions. A comprehensive view of related research is provided next. In conclusion, possible partnership interventions are outlined, national partnership networks and intervention in the form of research and policy analysis being considered in the most detail. (RDN)