Organizational theorists have viewed organizations as "mini-societies" based upon commonly held cultural values and assumptions, which may serve to revolutionize organizational practices or to bring about new organization structures. The middle school is an example of an educational institution that has arisen as a result of a particular set of cultural values and assumptions. To test various theoretical assertions about organizational culture in educational institutions, this paper proposes conducting an empirical study of the middle school as the unit of analysis. The proposed investigation will define the ideal culture of the middle school as espoused by its advocates in the professional literature. Research instrumentation will be developed to determine the degree to which this ideal culture matches that found in selected middle schools. Two independent sample populations will be utilized. A pilot sample of 100 middle school teachers will generate reliability and validity data. The data gathered from a second sample of 200 middle school teachers will be applied to the two research instruments. The instruments will assess the degree of congruence between teachers' perceptions of the presence of various cultural elements in the middle schools in which they teach and the teachers' concept of the desirability of these factors in an ideal intermediate-level school. (A 64-item reference list is appended.) (Author/CJH)