Conventional thinking holds that districts and schools face a strategic decision between two fundamentally different alternatives: make or buy? The former refers to planning, designing, and enacting school-specific improvement initiatives. The latter refers to contracting with external providers of schoolwide improvement programs. However, there is much to suggest that "make or buy" is actually a false dichotomy that diverts attention from the core issue of systemic school improvement: collaborative, experiential learning among schools, districts, and external providers. As such, this analysis draws from research on comprehensive school reform and franchise-like organizational replication to suggest criteria for identifying external providers likely to function as full partners in such learning.