New Visions for Public Schools’ New Century High Schools Initiative in New York City highlights a strategy of school-level partnerships between educators from the New York City Department of Education (DoE) and non-profit organizational staff. The strategy aims to support the transformation of chronically low-performing large high schools (identified by the DoE) into campuses of high-performing, autonomous small schools. The initiative looks to the rich and varied partnership resources of knowledge, experience, opportunities, and skills in order to fulfill this challenging task. This volume, supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York, contains the first two papers of an examination of the translation of the partnership strategy into practice. The study finds that full implementation of the partnership strategy implies essential changes in traditional approaches to school structures, governance, teaching and learning practices, personalization approaches, and social supports. In order to enact these broad-stroke aims, educators on the ground – the DoE and organizational staff members who work in the schools – must devise new ways of thinking about, defining, and practicing their roles. Enacting school-level partnerships requires a reframing of the methods and content – that is, the means and meaning – of high school education.