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

It is this understanding that gives urgency to the imperative for comprehensive, coordinated school-linked services. If we are to prepare our young people for the challenging changes of the 21st century, education reform initiatives must target a complex constellation of problems. We must act on our knowledge that the learning environment extends far beyond the four walls of the classroom. Indeed, the school is but one strand of the social tapestry that must be woven tightly together if we are to protect our children from forces that dim their hopes and diminish their potential.

The movement toward coordinated services remains in its nascent stages, a time when hypotheses are far more common than certainties. Answers are elusive, and our knowledge limited to identifying the issues that must move front and center if comprehensive school change is not to be stymied by a narrow vision of the prerequisites for academic success. But this much is certain: Time is short; the public is impatient. We must accelerate progression toward the day when reform is guided by the joint efforts of researchers, practitioners, parents, social workers, health professionals, law enforcement officials, members of the business community, and other civic-minded citizens.

The harsh lesson of recent years is that reform in the absence of a comprehensive, cohesive, and compassionate social agenda will once again become a patch-work quilt of fragmented and conflicting elements. The integrated approach to education renewal that we advocate has the clear potential to halt the stop-and-start, three-steps-forward/two-steps-back history of education reform. The time has come to reach across self-created divides and focus on the whole child and the whole family and the whole community. Tunnel vision must give way to panoramic vision.

If we make this adjustment in our analytical lenses, we can then see clearly that the programs serving the needs of our young people cannot exist in splendid isolation from one another. To illustrate this thesis in dramatic fashion, I would contend that quality education begins with quality prenatal care, is enhanced by innovative recreational services for all children, and fortified by policies rooted in a realistic assessment of the profound challenges today confronting America's families. There is no hyperbole in this assertion.

We need, now more than ever, to be bolder, more imaginative, and above all more holistic in our thinking. We must give new meaning to the phrase service to the common good. We must establish a knowledge base that defines the best approaches to integrated, coordinated services. Our goal is nothing less than to lay the groundwork for a citizens' alliance for education progress. Our foremost commitment is to the creation of a society that understands--and acts on that understanding--that "we do not inherit the world from our ancestors; we borrow the world from our children."

Sharon P. Robinson
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[Acknowledgements]

[AERA President's Remarks]