This document contains the proceedings of a conference for educators, business leaders, and government officials involved in school reform. The speakers at the conference were involved in city-wide partnerships that establish long-term, measurable goals for school improvement in exchange for business' pledge of employment opportunities for youth. The first section, The Imperative to Act, discusses why business needs to get involved in school reform and the costs of not doing so. In the section called Waves of Action, an argument is made for businesses to take a step beyond the "fuzzy altruism" of adopt-a-school and job and grant programs to become a "tough-minded friend" that holds schools accountable to high standards of performance. The third section, called Action Steps and Findings, describes the experience of the Boston Compact and highlights 10 lessons learned from similar compact projects. The section called Guideposts for Action Assessment examines how to measure the success of business-education partnerships with a three-element framework: conditions for change, defining change, and managing change. Appendix A states five goals of the Boston Compact. Appendix B is an 11-item bibliography of articles, reports, and newsletters. Appendix C describes the backgrounds of the conference speakers. The document concludes with a list of the National Alliance of Business (NAB) board of directors, locations of NAB, and the board of directors of the Institute for Educational Leadership. (CML)