The evidence presented in this chapter 1. A large part of the reason may be the diffi- culty in actually determining the effectiveness of reforms, and the belief of policymakers that reforms are more successful than they actually are. The counterproductive rate of policy churn and turnover of superintendents is perpetuated by a lack of objective performance criteria and by an exagger- ated sense of progress among administrators and other insiders. When one reform fails, reformers pursue another. They assume that something eventually will work.
Teachers are suspicious of formal authority, wary of being abandoned and . . .
Therefore, most studies look intensively at only a handful of schools or school districts. In this study a very different approach was used in order to assess the validity of the relatively obvious, but generally unheeded, proposition that districts that do more will not do it as well. Respondents' evaluations of implementation and reform success were used to compare reform performance across districts. This approach is obviously imperfect. Respondents were asked to use imperfect information to summarize a complex phenomena in a simple manner.