As is enunciated by its policy guidelines, funds for compensatory education are being used to provide a diversity of intervention experiences for disadvantaged children. Difficulty in recognizing these implementation practices and outcomes has arisen because of a more popular, but narrow, view of compensatory education. Instead of attempting to discover whether intervention patterns have been established to administer to the needs of disadvantaged children, the emphases have been on identifying intrinsic conditions that would preclude the realization of the major goal of compensatory education. In 1972 a study was conducted with the purpose of determining whether the projects of a compensatory program were creating instructional and affective intervention units for meeting the categorical needs of its target population. It was found that the intervention projects had formed four individually prescribed learning (IPL) conditions. Each IPL condition was well-defined and served a unique subgroup within the target population. In the majority of the cases, the matches between the instructional content of the IPLs and the needs of the target schools were good. Where the matches were less appropriate, the rates of progress were lowest. In the main, the study supported the hypothesis that compensatory programs provide not a single thrust but a number of individually prescribed learning conditions to meet the behavioral needs of the children in the target population. These data suggest that additional monies are needed to assist local educational agencies in bringing into more proper alignment their current IPL conditions with the schools that they must serve. (Author/JM)