This document presents the lessons of Jobs for the Future's Benchmark Communities Initiative (BCI), a 5-year systemic educational reform initiative launched in 1994 in five communities. Before joining the BCI, the five Benchmark communities had each begun a school-to-career effort. Five key findings from the BCI are outlined: (1) students engaged in intensive school-to-career experiences that have strong work-based learning components compare favorably to peers on a number of key academic achievement indicators; (2) for school-to-career efforts to affect overall student outcomes significantly, specific program activities and components must be defined as core elements of the district's overall reform strategy; (3) enabling conditions that make a systemic reform agenda possible are a high-level leadership group bridging all partners and institutions that convene and connect those partners; (4) districts and their partners can enhance the educational value of students' work-based learning experiences in spite of serious barriers; and (5) data can be a powerful driver for reform when communities create a process for measuring the right things at the right time. Performance measurement was central to the BCI effort, helping partners to hold one another accountable for progress toward agreed-on goals. (SLD)