School reform and improvement are driven by individuals, often working alongside each other. Drawing on in-depth interviews with researchers, philanthropists, and school improvement staff in Chicago, Philadelphia, and NYC, I found that education reformers employed varying logics and strategies even as they worked toward similar goals: "Engineers" used information, incentives, and interventions to promote technical changes while "capacity-builders" worked in schools to broker networks and instructional resources for relational changes within the system. More distantly, "framers" used research to reframe discourse and legitimize reforms while "table-setters" capitalized on investments and elite networks for systems-level changes. This research contributes to studies of school reform and leadership by suggesting how actors outside schools--with their logics and strategies--impact changes within it.