By June 1983, California enacted Senate Bill 813, a sweeping, comprehensive education reform program that contained over 80 education policy and program reforms. The state legislature asked the research team to analyze schools that were effectively responding to reform stimuli and to identify how Senate Bill 813 aided, hindered, or was irrelevant to local processes of school improvement. Seventeen secondary schools were specially selected for this study. Each site researcher produced qualitative data that answered, for each of 14 state policies, a series of detailed questions about the policy as implemented in the school, the process of implementation, linkage to school and district vision and other state policies, and perceptions of the policy's purpose and substance by teachers and administrators. Additional qualitative data answered detailed quesitons about 23 implementation variables in the conceptual framework. The study found that state improvement efforts in curriculum and instruction can interact with local initiative to improve secondary schools. Local implementation processes are critical to the success of such improvements, and a common local implementation process is successful across schools that differ ethnically, geographically, and demographically. Nine appendixes, which compose almost two-thirds of the report, contain research instruments and data summaries. (MLF)