This document is a record of the proceedings of a symposium for outstanding teachers and principals from all 50 states and trust territories, jointly sponsored by the Burger King Corporation, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Association for Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and held in December 1984 at Captiva Island, Florida. The speakers and participants focused on three major topics: (1) the issues of educational reform in the 1980s; (2) the consequences for public education of actual and projected demographic, sociological, and economic changes; and (3) major systemic reforms, with an emphasis on developing and supporting practitioners--teachers and principals--as professional decision makers. Accordingly, after an introductory description of the symposium, chapter 2 summarizes the speakers' and participants' observations on the central issues of educational reform. Chapter 3 reports the results of a survey of the teachers and principals at the conference on job satisfaction and status of the profession, the school environment, and policy initiatives. Implications of these findings are then discussed. Chapter 4, "Looking toward the Future," reviews the success of the conference as a whole and the promise that it holds for future interaction and exchange of views between policymakers and practitioners. Appended are statistical tables delineating the results of the survey and a list of participants, as well as excerpts from presentations by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Harold Hodgkinson, Philip Cusick, Theodore Sizer, Bernard Watson, Don Beveridge, Marsha Levine, Richard Rodriguez, John Casteen, III, Floretta Dukes McKenzie, and Gary Jones. (TE)