Minority students in urban schools have the most to gain if efforts at reforming urban school systems work and the most to lose if nothing changes. Yet research on educational reform has not addressed how minority communities influence decisions about how to change their children's schools. Thus far, research has dealt only with how reform affects minority students and communities, not with how minority groups affect the planning of reform. This article offers a more active perspective. It investigates how a minority group might influence the conceptualization, planning, and implementation of urban school reform and suggests a framework for that influence.