It is widely understood that school districts face significant barriers to designing and implementing sustained improvements in chronically underperforming schools. In particular, the size and complexity of urban districts pose daunting challenges to advance significant reform efforts, despite glaring need. A new wave of district-led "innovation zones" holds promise to overcome these challenges and deliver significant improvements in student outcomes. The experiences of five school districts that are vanguards of this new wave of innovation zones--Chicago; Denver; Indianapolis; Memphis, Tennessee; and Springfield, Massachusetts--are the subject of this report. These innovation zones reveal certain design features that place a focus on improving teaching and learning over multiple years--the heart of any successful turnaround effort. Research identified three primary types of innovation zones: (1) district-led; (2) third-party led; and (3) autonomous improvement zones. Each type takes a different approach to reach the same goal--improving student outcomes for a subset of schools by providing guaranteed school-based autonomy in return for higher expectations and accountability for performance. Beyond academic improvement, innovation zones profiled in this report often have broad support from teachers, parents, and students. They do not face heavy public resistance that, at times, besieges charter schools or state takeovers in predominantly African-American or Latino communities. By contrast, innovation zones often retain district administrators and teachers of color with deep roots in their community. While the innovation zones profiled in this report outshine most prior turnaround efforts, they also have a long way to go to demonstrate the kind of sustainable progress it takes to help put low-income students on the academic path that leads to upward social mobility.