This study attempts to identify and describe Minnesota superintendents' perceptions of barriers to district-level reform as well as compare superintendents' perceptions of district reform related characteristics. This research also strives to identify factors preventing Minnesota's district-level leadership from implementing national reform efforts. All acting superintendents in the state of Minnesota were surveyed using a quantitative descriptive approach. The study revealed two major findings: Superintendents who claimed their districts had leadership skills to enact school change and knowledge of successful strategies regarding school reform were unrelated to the identification of barriers to district-level reform; and superintendents who claimed that their districts had passive resistance to change and ingrained patterns of behavior to resist change were related to the identification of barriers to district-level reform. (Contains 2 tables and 1 footnote.)