Public-school students in the world's largest city, Shanghai, China, are academically outperforming their counterparts across the globe and becoming the talk and envy of education experts worldwide. Using an innovative partnering approach that matches successful schools with low-performing schools, Shanghai has valuable lessons to teach on turning around public-school systems--lessons that transcend several of the unique characteristics of the Chinese educational system, as well as the country's rich pedagogical traditions. In this report the authors discuss and closely examine Shanghai's empowered-management program, an important education initiative that has markedly improved low-performing schools in Shanghai. The authors discuss the program and its implementation in detail in order to help readers better understand it and to determine those aspects of it that would best suit school systems in the United States. Importantly, this paper argues that cultural differences would not prevent the bulk of this program from being successfully reproduced in the United States, although the authors fully acknowledge that the program cannot be replicated without some attention to differences across systems. Methodology is appended.