Local school districts must strengthen their innovative capacity in order to respond effectively to the problems facing them. Success depends on both an organization's technical capacity to match problems with appropriate solutions and its political capacity to move an innovation through the process from adoption to incorporation. Research shows that the organization's ability to build a winning coalition, providing enough support to sustain the innovation against opposition, is crucial. An examination of several attempts at innovation over more than a decade in the school districts of Syracuse and Rochester in New York tested the nature of the coalitions involved, investigating their formation, operations, and effect on subsequent decision-making. This document summarizes and analyzes the results of this extensive study, involving a number of separate, but related, case histories. The analysis leads to conclusions concerning the local educational organization as an innovative mechanism, bureaucratic entrepreneurship and coalition-building within education, the applicability of the research team's decision-making model to education, the comparison of educational innovation in Syracuse and Rochester, and the residual effects of innovation and coalition-building. (Author/PGD)