Based principally on data collected for a broader 11-city study of civic capacity in urban education, this report provides an account of the durability of judicially supervised consent decrees in the school reform arena and explains why judicial intervention may be sought and sustained in the 1990s, often in the absence of evidence that schools are able to achieve a court's explicit reform objectives. A central conclusion is that court-supervised change may offer politically powerful benefits to client groups and school leaders alike and may address some of the most critical collective action problems facing education stakeholders in the urban setting. The court-supervised process in San Francisco (California) is observed to: (1) increase the amount of politically relevant information available in the public domain about school practices and outcomes; (2) create incentives for client-group coalition building on controversial, multipolar issues; (3) assist school leaders in the management of institutional change; and (4) serve to create a forum for the making of credible, enforceable commitments among stakeholders with disparate interests who have often expressed mutual distrust. (Contains 17 references and 32 footnotes.) (Author/SLD)