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

Four of the six groups, or strands, focused on specific age groups. The remaining dealt with cross-cutting issues of interprofessional development and evaluation.

Collaboration in early childhood services presents researchers with a complex landscape where legal, fiscal, and organizational characteristics tend to make each situation unique. Reflective of this complexity, the Working Group on Early Childhood included representatives from local collaborative efforts--families as well as practitioners--with distinctive experiences.

Although school-linked services involve multiple systems (e.g. mental health, child welfare, health, family support, and education), the diversity of programs represented at the conference illustrates what some researchers have termed a "patchwork" of services for young children. Moreover, there is a dynamism to services for young children; families, programs, and issues are changing constantly. Thus, evaluation "snapshots," the participants pointed out, cannot truly capture the concerns and progress made in collaborative services for this age group. The challenge, they said, is to make research relevant to their diverse needs and contexts.

The demands for collaborative early childhood services and the many areas where practitioners need more and better knowledge led the Working Group to conclude that the field is "likely to be highly impatient with evaluation and scholarship" that are not timely, relevant, clear, and of high quality.

The Elementary Working Group, representing elementary school programs, researchers, and policy groups, worked from a vision of "what should be" as well as from their own experience as to what now exists in school-linked services. Its credo was: "This is my family, and this is how I have a right to be treated." School-linked services, the Working Group said, should be designed as "the value-based, family-driven, action-oriented outcomes of the efforts of all individuals involved in the process of providing needed services." To achieve this vision, all helping systems and disciplines need to become less bureaucratic, more democratic in their relationships with children and families.

The Working Group discussion underscored the major themes common throughout all of the groups, but it singled out a significant area for expanding research on school-linked services. This is the growing recognition that research in general and in special education can no longer be conducted on parallel tracks. Progress in one field depends upon progress in the other; therefore, research and dissemination of research findings in both areas need to be integrated.

Issues related to school-linked services change subtly, but in important ways, when the focus is on adolescents and their families rather than on young children. For example, the strong emphasis upon providing services through health clinics means that the issue of confidentiality becomes a a source of conflict in services for adolescents. This also is the age when the lack of services and supports often results in alienation of young people from school, even to the degree that they drop out.

The composition of the Adolescent Working Group, representing rural and urban and advantaged families as well as those in poverty, illustrates that the concerns about adolescents are commonly shared. Most social problems ultimately arrive at the schoolhouse door.

The Working Group affirmed that a knowledge base about school-linked comprehensive programs for adolescents provides a foundation for bringing such services "to scale." But much needs to be learned. Some of the most significant--though still inadequate--research concerns school-based clinics. The research shows positive results from such services, including the provision of preventive care, a decrease in unwise health choices by adolescents, and good rates of return for dollars spent.

A background paper for the Adolescent Working Group notes that federal policies in a number of agencies now support the initial efforts of states and foundations to build coordinated services. The paper also found, however, that although agencies and programs are ready, they are stymied by lack of funding, training, and technical assistance.

Research, the Working Group concluded, can help these efforts make a transition from a relocation of services to a true systems change, in which schools/institutions are comfortable in sharing missions.

"Displaced children" is a fairly new phrase in the youth development field, but so is the phenomenon of considerable numbers of children and young people who have been uprooted from their homes, families, and communities. Immigration, migration, and homelessness are the major causes of displacement. Yet, the Youth in Transition Working Group drew a picture of an even larger problem, focusing its discussions on what it considered "disconnected" youth who do not always fit into the categories for displacement. This would include pregnant teenagers, latchkey children, troubled gay and lesbian teens, gang members, youth with physical and mental challenges, dropouts, and those on probation.

In fact, said the Working Group, "America today does not know how many desperate, uncategorized young people need services, but we know that services should be available to all of these children when they need them." For the youth served by the programs represented in the Working Group, "culturally affirmative education and services are, too often, matters of life and death."

The researchers who surveyed data and studies about displaced youth found that both policies and programs are at a rudimentary level; they mostly are grassroots in origin and remain isolated initiatives (migrant programs, on the national agenda since the 1960s, are an exception). Consequently, evaluations are limited. Being a "new" problem is only one of the factors related to the dearth of research data. Because serving the needs of displaced youth is so urgent, evaluations become a secondary concern. Also, it is difficult to conduct traditional research, such as comparison groups or large samples.

The discussions by the Youth in Transition Working Group confirmed findings that not much research exists about programs that serve these troubled youth. However, the group's knowledge of programs that are working led it to the conclusion that it is possible "to break the vicious cycle of ... poor situations reproducing more poor and desperate situations."

Most partnerships between universities and schools and other community agencies to prepare professionals for a changing field of service are in the early stages of development. Almost all of the representatives in the Interprofessional Development Working Group considered themselves entrepreneurs or pioneers on university campuses, often more closely linked to their community partners than to the traditionalist decisionmakers within the university. Dependent largely on foundation or other sources of seed money, they were extremely concerned about the assurance of support over the long term for the complicated and difficult task of revising professional education.

Despite the newness of the programs and different approaches among the participants, the Working Group found that they shared the same vision and values and the same commitment to a new paradigm of practice--one that is family-centered, community-based, empowerment-oriented, and outcomes-driven. The awesome task is to renew professional education to fit this paradigm at the same time that services and supports for families are also undergoing dramatic reform.

The Evaluation Working Group participants included evaluators from school-linked comprehensive services programs and experts in research and evaluation from several universities. They described the evaluation of comprehensive and collaborative services for children and families as complex, unprecedented, and needing careful attention to context. Drawing on the background paper prepared for the Working Group, the group focused on several evaluation issues related to the complexity of school-linked services models. Evaluators in this area first dealt with the issue of divergent perspectives, including those of professionals from many disciplines as well as the perspectives of communities, schools, and students. Moreover, research results must be useful to multiple audiences who comprise the "consumers" of services--policymakers, practitioners, and other researchers. Therefore, evaluation must be "user friendly" as well as timely.

One of the dilemmas immediately apparent to the Working Group was the necessity to view comprehensive services as a synergistic system rather than distinct, isolated programs. Another concern involved political contexts of evaluations, requiring evaluators to balance practitioners' needs for useful, timely information to improve programs without sacrificing research quality with policymakers' needs to know what works. Several characteristics of school-linked comprehensive service programs make them very difficult to evaluate. In particular, the difficulty is intensified by:

• the complexity and flexibility of the programs which make it difficult to adequately identify and characterize the independent variables of interest,

• the difficulty in assessing quality and degree of collaboration, and

• the interdisciplinary nature of the endeavor involving researchers from different fields who rarely communicate with each other (Kagan, 1991; Knapp, 1994). In order to address these challenges, alternative approaches to traditional evaluation have been suggested, including participatory evaluation involving stakeholders and clients (Weiss & Greene, 1992), longitudinal studies, and a developmental approach to evaluation which provides more formative feedback (Gray, 1993).

Participants discussed the need to address cultural sensitivity and congruence primarily from three different approaches:

• study of the impact of contextual factors, particularly cultural factors, on the processes and outcomes of the intervention,

• ways to conduct evaluations that are appropriate and congruent with the culture of the community in which the services are located, and

• the importance of developing evaluators who understand and operate sensitively in different cultural settings.

Rather than depend upon traditional research designs such as group comparisons or meta-analyses, the Working Group decided that more productive approaches to evaluation would include profiles of participants, multiple case descriptions, study of costs, single-subject and single-system time series studies, and exemplary practice studies. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies should be employed in these designs.
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[Introduction]

[Compelling Conference Themes]