This paper summarizes a preferred design of organizational effectiveness studies of small rural school districts. The preferred design consists of five major and mostly sequential steps: (1) considering a large number of complex policy questions associated with the issue of organizational effectiveness efforts; (2) deciding on the technical issue of how best to think about subsystems of a rural district for which measures of quality are to be developed; (3) deciding what is to constitute measures of quality of each of the subsystems; (4) reaching agreement on the translation of the measures of quality into operational standards that will reflect the contextual reality of each district; and (5) establishing the presence or absence of a standard. For each of these steps options to be considered are listed. The preferred design is influenced by the belief that one universal model for assessing organizational effectiveness of rural school districts cannot exist at present. The paper finds it is more useful to develop frameworks for assessing effectiveness than to develop a theory of effectiveness that applies to rural school systems. (CS)