The Columbia Group is a collective of seven organizations located throughout the Southeast, dedicated to communicating the central role that better education plays in the future of their states and recommending and implementing ways to ensure that education in these states is in fact better. It is true that there are a few education advocacy organizations based in other states throughout the country. It is also true that there exist successful education reform efforts rooted in business involvement in community issues, notably the Business Roundtable groups. But nowhere else has a group of state-based education organizations strategically joined forces to create an active network and to begin to forge a regional agenda for education reform.