Business leaders created New American Schools (NAS) to develop "break-the-mold" designs for schools serving grades K-12. The notion of a design was meant to convey a coherent and comprehensive set of school-level practices that unified a school behind a goal of high performance by all students. These practices would cover all grades, all students in the school, and all-important functional areas of the school. The designs developed by NAS and the teams have changed significantly as they have tried to implement their designs in hundreds of schools in the districts that partnered with NAS for this purpose. These changes to designs are the subject of this report. Its purpose is to document changes to the designs over their short life span and reasons for those changes to understand better the likely contribution of this reform to student improvements. The report uses historical analysis of the design documents, interviews with design teams, and notes from site visits to establish the changes that have taken place in designs over the period 1992 to 1998. It uses the original proposals submitted in response to NAS's Request for Proposals as the baseline for making comparisons. The report documents significant changes over time in the designs and in the concept of what a design includes. The designs themselves have changed in terms of their educational components and theories. Finally, the design teams have developed implementation strategies and assistance packages over time that have resulted in the expansion of the design concepts to the concept of designed-based assistance. (Contains 76 references, 9 tables, and 1 figure.) (DFR)