Although the failure of open education experiments are often attributed to declining reading and mathematics scores, overwheming class sizes, and practical difficulties in implementing theory, the examination of a particular open education program in a suburban New York school district points to other possible reasons for the program's failure. First, while it may have been wise to examine other schools for worthwhile ideas, it was probably unwise to have tried to adopt a program from another community without taking considerable time to adapt it to their own. Second, whenever teachers feel that specific conditions of an experimental program are untenable from the outset, as they did in the project reported here, it is unlikely that they will be able to concentrate their efforts on the important curricular changes to be tested. Third, the inservice course offered this particular group should have been tailored to the needs of the staff. Fourth, it was never clear if all the teachers wanted to be involved. If the project outlined in this paper can serve as an example, it is quite possible that many so-called open education projects have been truncated for reasons quite apart from the problems involved in implementing open education practices. (Author/RLV)