In Latin American education systems the inspectorate is an administrative level linking the central national educational administration to the local operations level. Traditionally the inspector's function has been to enforce fulfillment of pedagogical and administrative norms at the local level and to transmit pertinent information on achievement to higher authorities. In more recent times this role has grown to include overseeing the implementation of innovations. This history (as exemplified in Costa Rica), along with borrowings from administrative theory, was used to develop an analytical model of the inspector's role based on the systems approach as it is applied in the field of the social cybernetics. This model in turn was used to develop hypotheses about the inspector's role in periods of rapid educational reform. A questionnaire survey of 25 percent of Costa Rica's inspectors provided data permitting the drawing of conclusions concerning 17 hypotheses relating to the implementation of several specific reforms in Costa Rica in the 1970's, and these conclusions provided information regarding the impact of reforms and the inspectorate subsystem on each other (from ERIC database)