The poor performance of students in America's urban high schools, both in absolute terms and in comparison with their more economically secure counterparts in suburban schools, is a critical issue for the country, and the opportunity for all students to learn mathematics has been heralded as the new "civil right." In a recent study of mathematics teaching in different schools, the author and a group of graduate students at Stanford found that students at Railside High School (a pseudonym), an urban school in California nestled within a few feet of the train tracks, performed better in mathematics than students at other schools and that differences in achievement among Railside students of different cultural groups were reduced in all cases and eliminated in some. Railside was one of three schools in which they spent four years following cohorts of students from their freshman to their senior years as they experienced different approaches to mathematics instruction. As part of the study, they documented the teaching practices of the Railside mathematics department--practices focused upon equity. In this article, the author considers some of the most important aspects of Railside's reform-oriented approach to mathematics instruction--an approach that transformed students' lives by helping them to see mathematics as a part of their future and by providing them with the quantitative reasoning capabilities needed to function in an increasingly technological and global economy.