In an effort to significantly improve student achievement and meet the mandates of No Child Left Behind, more public schools are turning toward externally developed comprehensive school reform (CSR) providers. CSR models provide a top-down direction for designing and supporting the process of school reform; tangible and accessible support for school change presumably steeped in research and literally packaged and delivered to the school site. Recognizing the difficulty of successful implementation and scale-up, this qualitative study offers a framework for assessing initial implementation of externally provided CSR models. Drawing on the existing literature regarding CSR implementation and scale-up, the field study team developed a framework that includes qualitative assessment of teacher attitudes toward program implementation from a variety of perspectives. This study provides an indicator of teacher attitudes during initial implementation and a related literature review to help guide a school district's formative assessment of implementation of a specific CSR model in two urban middle schools. This paper is focused on only one aspect of the findings: communication disconnect among relevant stakeholders