Some public schools do a great job educating students of color to high standards. But they populate public education much the way houses in rural regions appear at night from a jetliner passing high above--as faint beacons. The core challenge of school reform today is to produce not merely a few glimmers of success but the dense glow of thousands of bright educational lights, to create not just a few schools that close the nation's troubling achievement gaps but entire systems of them. Three urban districts with large populations of disadvantaged students of color--Rochester, New York, East Orange, New Jersey; and Duval County, Florida--have been successfully building such systems with the help of an outside catalyst, the America's Choice School Design, a comprehensive, standards-based school-improvement program (see "America's Choice School Design"). The results have been encouraging. America's Choice has contracted with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, an independent research organization based at the University of Pennsylvania, to evaluate the performance of America's Choice schools. The relationships between East Orange, Rochester and Duval and America's Choice have different origins, but they share important features that are critical to the districts' successful work with an outside partner to improve school performance. At the same time, all three districts have worked hard to win support for comprehensive school improvement from the ground up in schools.