The purpose of this set of papers is to illuminate the school reform implementation process by presenting data from two studies examining themes in "scaling"up" reform designs. There are dozens of school restructuring designs (e.g., Coalition of Essential Schools, AVID untracking program, Success for All) each with a national support group, each rapidly growing. A wide variety of K-12 school reform designs have demonstrated that they can result in positive changes in individual schools or small numbers of selected schools. However, over the past 25 years, very few reforms have clearly demonstrated the ability to have educationally significant effects when implemented in large numbers of schools. A variety of studies have suggested that replicating the successes from a limited sample to a large sample of schools is very difficult, as bringing a program to scale is a "nested" problem existing in similar forms at different levels of the system (Elmore, 1996). If programs that have the potential to positively change schools exist, but have not been readily transferred using what has been known about "scaling up" promising programs, then thoughtful studies of the implementation process are a critical next step toward school improvement.

We know little about the "scale up" or reform implementation process, and even less how to conceptualize it . By combining a theoretical framework for conceptualizing implementation detailed case studies of a multi-state study of one reform design's effort to replicate in secondary schools nationwide and a case study of a within-district effort of support replications of numerous school restructuring designs at the elementary level, this set of papers should offer a novel, much needed, examination of the process of reform implementation.

Overall, the papers suggest that the process of implementing a tested prototype program to additional sites while remaining sensitive to the local context of each site is far more complex than initially though, and involves an interconnected or relational conception of social life. Implementation is not a linear sequence or mechanical process of program testing, adoption, and institutioanalization in which educators in schools passively respond to directives. In the real world, educators may act in a variety of ways in response to the reforms. Most importantly, the agency of educators in schools undertaking reform is part of a complex dynamic, shaping and shaped by the structural and cultural features of school and society.