An alarming trend of low performance and legal problems dogged the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) in the early and mid-1990s. In 1997, the Maryland State Legislature adopted a law creating a partnership between the sate, city and BCPSS, creating a new Board of Commissioners to run the school district. Under this leadership, serious school reform began in 1997. The district developed a strong focus on literacy, determined to hire fully licensed teachers, committed to provide professional development and to select research-based school reform strategies, and came to understand the use of data to drive instruction. These efforts have been rewarded: (1) Mean test scores have increased across the system; (2) For the first time in two decades, the majority of second and third graders scored above the national average on standardized tests; (3) BCPSS was the only district in the state to post improvements across the board on the Maryland state assessment; (4) Two BCPSS schools have been removed from the state's reconstitution-eligible list. In addition, the district continues to provide professional development to teachers on adapting teaching strategies to student results. The road to reform is always rocky, in part because it involves many players who often have diverging interests. In Baltimore, labor and management's common understanding that school improvement efforts were to raise chronically low student achievement served to enable both parties to work together in developing a more effective system, both for students in this district and the professionals who teach them. (Contains 2 footnotes.)