This brochure highlights themes of a meeting held November 7, 1996 in Columbus, Ohio. The meeting was cosponsored by the National Alliance of Business, the Business Coalition for Education Reform, the Ohio Business Roundtable, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, and the Ohio Manufacturers' Association. Its purpose was to underscore how business partners can deploy practical, rigorous, and tested organizational improvement strategies to support local education reform initiatives. It highlighted the use of customer satisfaction surveys and an integrated management system to improve student and system performance. The management system is based on the criteria used by the National Institute of Standards for its Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, a customer-focused, data-driven blueprint to attain positive business results. This brochure provides business leaders and coalitions with information and resources they can use to support academic achievement in their own communities. Quality assessments based on the Baldrige criteria provide a solid foundation for exercising leadership, distinguishing between policy making and implementation, and focusing all critical decisions and activities on improving student achievement. In education reform, standards provide the destination, and quality assessments offer the road map. Partnerships between business and education leaders will accelerate the journey. (SLD)