In higher education, a university is typically loosely coupled with its suprasystems, but its various schools or colleges tend to be tightly coupled with the university, as are departments with their respective schools or colleges. Similarly, in the corporate sector, a training department is typically tightly coupled with the company management system. Of course, the strength of coupling can vary considerably within any type of system or context area and therefore needs to be assessed. The central point of this discussion is that relationships between a system and its suprasystem can have a large impact on the success of a systemic change effort. Therefore, it is important to identify both the nature and strength of the relationships at the onset of an effort, and to plan for ways both to capitalize on the facilitative aspects and minimize the inhibitory aspects of that relationship. It is a general tenet among systems theorists that, if you want to help a system to change, you have to also foster supportive changes in its suprasystem (Banathy, 1991), or at very least seek exclusions, waivers or other arrangements that will remove impediments to systemic change. The concept of coevolution in systems theory indicates that a system and its suprasystem must always change together (Banathy, 1996). If one evolves to be incompatible with the other, the resulting evolutionary imbalance puts both at peril, and the tighter the coupling, the greater the peril. The papers presented in this section are as follows: (1) General Influences of Suprasystems on Systemic Change (Charles M. Reigeluth); (2) Influences of Federal Policy on Systemic Change in K-12 Education (Susan Patrick); (3) Influences of NCLB on K-12 Systemic Educational Reform (Gerardo M. Gonzalez); (4) Influences of State Policy on Systemic Change in K-12 Education (Kathy Christie); (5) Influences of Charter School Policy on Systemic Change in K-12 Education; and (6) Influences of National Policy on K-12 Education in an Asian Country: The Korean Case (Hongsoo Lee).