The Massachusetts Comprehensive Special Education Law (Chapter 766) was used as a model for P.L. 94-142, the federal law mandating education for all handicapped students. This draft reports preliminary findings of a study concerning compliance with and implementation efforts toward the Massachusetts law, with an eye toward implications for the federal act. The field study focused on nine Boston public schools chosen to reflect varying degrees of compliance with the law. Data were gathered through interviews with principals and Core Evaluation Team chairpersons, the prime school-level implementors of the law. The study suggests that school-level implementation factors related to compliance include (1) goal consensus and role clarity by school personnel; (2) sophistication of the school's organizational processes; (3) ability of the school to communicate with other organizations; (4) sufficiency of human, fiscal, physical, and material resources; (5) amount of control over the implementation process; (6) the level of commitment to compliance; (7) the number of children who are referred and the ability to handle them; and (8) the amount of time the school has had to comply with the measure. From the school's perspective, the main constraints to compliance include lack of personnel and materials from the Boston Public Schools and unmanageably high caseloads. (Author/JM)