A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Recent federal legislation places a priority on such collaboration. Both Goals 2000 and the reauthorization of Title I, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, underscore the importance of linking groups and services. The omnibus crime and empowerment zone legislation efforts call for comprehensive efforts to help vulnerable children and families.

The empowerment zone and enterprise community initiative calls upon communities to develop comprehensive, locally determined strategies for creating economically healthy communities in which families can flourish.

These offer unprecedented opportunities and challenges to educators at all levels. However, the consensus on the need for such policymaking is moving ahead without adequate knowledge about the effects of collaborative services on children and families, the best practices in this area, or the impact upon the professional lives of people across different disciplines.

Thus, it is imperative for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) to lead the way in developing a research agenda that complements this increasingly important emphasis in policymaking. Indeed, as part of the reorganization of OERI in 1994, Congress required an interagency focus in each of the five new overarching institutes established by the legislation.

Moreover, discussions that are taking place across Cabinet-level agencies on policies needed to support collaboration among services have produced some basic principles. These include:

• an understanding that student learning depends upon partnerships that involve all relevant community institutions,

• the importance of focusing comprehensive and coordinated services on results,

• the imperative of allowing local needs and commitment to determine the shape of collaborative systems, and

• the need to use research data to affect assessment and accountability. For each of these components, OERI, other federal agencies, private foundations and the research community could provide important knowledge.

More than 100 researchers, educators, family members, program leaders, and federal officials gathered together in the fall of 1994 to set an agenda for such research on school-linked services. Cosponsors with OERI were the American Educational Research Association and the National Center on Education in the Inner Cities at Temple University.

Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement Sharon Robinson charged those at the working conference to "provide us with your best thinking as to how new methodologies and new research paradigms can best identify 'what works, why it works, and how it might work even better.'" Robinson said, a special need was guidance on how to redesign professional development across disciplines to help people learn to work together.

Focusing on these twin themes--what is known/needs to be known about school-linked services and the improvement of interprofessional development--the Working Conference participants spent most of the four-day meeting in separate Working Group discussions organized around issues in:

• Early childhood

• Elementary

• Adolescents

• Youth in transition (Students who are homeless, dropouts, juvenile offenders, and/or those individuals who need special services)

• Interprofessional development

• Evaluation

Each group drew from rich resources. Not only did the participants include directors of successful programs and family members served by their programs, but the participants started with comprehensive reviews of relevant research findings and policy implications prepared by researchers familiar with the issues before each group.

While it is impossible to do justice in any summary to the wealth of ideas contained in the papers, several themes emerged, including:

• Research on school-linked services, likewise, must apply more non-traditional methods in order to capture the complexity of trying to understand the nature of and the results from comprehensive services.

• A redesign of research in this area needs to consider two priorities--a focus on outcomes for children and families, and the inclusion of "clients" of programs as contributors to both constructing research agendas and evaluating outcomes.

• The development of leadership for school-linked comprehensive services and of collaborative skills among all of the disciplines involved is an urgent priority.

The conference on a research agenda for school-linked comprehensive services began, obviously, with more questions than answers. As in any meeting of those whose lives are devoted to the well-being of children and families, the scope of what needs to be done often seemed overwhelming.

However, four days of intensive discussion produced moments of inspired metaphors, the candid sharing of ideas and experience, and finally a consensus on a workable plan for the research community. In the past, said one participant, "research has been a way to make or break a project." In the new context that uses outcome measures, "research can now help make projects more effective, collect helpful information, and show how to improve programs through process evaluation."

Roles are changing for researchers and for OERI in this important effort at collaboration across services and disciplines. The Working Conference, Assistant Secretary Robinson emphasized, was the first step in "rigorously documenting the changes that school-linked services can make on children, their families, and practitioners."

As one of the metaphors produced by the Working Conference described the future: "It should be like geese flying in formation, with shared leadership and everyone headed in the same direction."
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[Steering Committee]

[Conference Strands]