During his short tenure in Baghdad (1869-72), Ottoman governor Midhat Pasha oversaw diverse urban reforms, including widening streets, building more roads connecting Baghdad to other cities, constructing bridges, and introducing public works such as public fountains and gas lamps. However, Midhat Pasha’s reforms were not limited to the built environment of the city. Seeking to address Baghdad’s urban poverty, Midhat Pasha introduced a major innovation that he had already successfully implemented in the Balkan provinces, the ?slahhane. This was a boarding and vocational school for children and young teenagers who were orphans, poor, or considered delinquent, where students could be reformed through education and work. Through reading, writing, and arithmetic courses, and vocational training in areas like carpentry, leather-working, or running a printing press, students were shaped into ideal subjects who could become self-sufficient and support the troubled Ottoman economy. Examining sources such as photographs, architectural plans, provincial almanacs, memoirs, Ministry of Education registers, and building endowment deeds, my paper argues that reformers saw this school as an urban engine for holistic social reform as it was tasked with clearing the streets of imperfect children, creating a clean and safe public space, promoting a modern curriculum, and improving the economy. My paper considers the history and design of the ?slahhane in Baghdad from the Tanzimat reform period (1839-1876) to the First World War. I expand scholarship on Late Ottoman architecture and urbanism, which has focused largely on Istanbul, Anatolia, and the Balkans, to Baghdad to demonstrate how educational and social reforms affected this peripheral city and how governors and architects realized reforms through institutional buildings. I ask how the plan, form, and style of this institution demonstrate differences between architecture of the center and periphery of the empire and to what extent such differences were determined by Ottoman and Arab nationalisms and local building culture. My paper considers the relationship of the ?slahhane to emerging technologies in the Arab provinces, as well as the relationship of morality, public health, and education, evident in the preoccupation with removing urchins from the street and maintaining religion as one foundation of the school’s curriculum. Efforts to standardize the ?slahhane across the empire, such as maintaining a constantly migrating network of teachers and students between each school, while leaving flexibility for local needs, demonstrate that despite political upheaval and economic duress, late Ottoman reformers achieved some success in administrative and educational change.