Dale Mann Teachers College Columbia University New York, New York In the recent past, it has been relatively easy to effect school reform through teacher turnover and recruitment. As long as teacher mobility remained high, a principal could count on replacing perhaps as much as one-fifth of the staff in a year. But now and for the foreseeable future, mobility will be greatly constricted by the teacher surplus, the availability of maternity leaves, the need for multiple incomes per family, and the effects of unionization. School reform must now be accomplished through existing personnel. More than ever before, those who seek to change schools must change teachers while they are working in the schools. The euphemism for that is staff development or inservice. In the last decade, federal, state and local education agencies have invested heavily in attempting to stimulate and sometimes force improvements in schooling. These efforts have used different theories of educational change and a variety of program strategies. The federal government has built labs and R & D centers, developed curriculum packages, sponsored workshops and staff development activities, and otherwise attempted to promote innovation in education. Those efforts at changing local schools have been evaluated through progress reports, contract audits, and a galaxy of formative and summative procedures. They have provided some interesting answers, but the question persists: happened? The data from these studies do not relieve the generally melancholy picture of how little of the reform agenda of the recent past has been achieved. Most educators realize that the amount and pace of change has fallen far short of initial expectations. The problem is more profound than simply pointing at the unrealistic impatience of the sixties. Programs were planned, curriculum was developed, teaching/ learning units were packaged, teachers were trained, and the results were frustrating, uneven, unexpected, and temporary. With hindsight it is easy to see that designing and disseminating change is not implementing change. What happens inside the school, at the service delivery level, is absolutely related to our success or failure, yet the gap in our knowledge about implementing change in the schools if formidable. This has profound implications for how we need to think about inservice education. Think of a number of very common, and very deeply rooted, assumptions held by most of us who work in and with schools. First, we believe that people can be changed that they are malleable, even that they may be perfectable. Since education is held to be one of the principle