The picture of U.S. cities that emerges from the research base on the development and education of children and families in this nation's inner cities is a startling juxtaposition of despair and hope, disorganization and potential. Nowhere are the problems and needs of children greater--young lives in disorder; families and neighborhoods, community agencies and schools desperately depleted of resources and spirit; the familiar litany of unemployment, crime, child abuse and neglect, and addiction to drugs and alcohol are all too prevalent; they confound and overshadow the problem of widespread academic failure in the schools, thus crippling the next generationþs best hope for transcending the problems they and our society face. But cities are also rich and promising resources. In spite of the problems that surround them, many remarkably resilient urban youngsters mature into healthy, competent adults.Identifying and nurturing what is positive in their lives rekindles hope and suggests how schools can better help inner-city youngsters fulfill their hopes and dreams to the greater benefit of our entire society.

It was with such hope that the program of research on "fostering resilience" of the National Center on Education in the Inner Cities (CEIC) was established at the Temple University Center for Research in Human Development and Education five years ago in collaboration with the university of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Houston. Other senior CEIC researchers are located at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, and California State University at Los Angeles. This issue of the CEIC Review provides a synopsis of major findings from the work of CEIC to date and discusses their implications for defining the next-step efforts to significantly improve the capacity for education in the inner cities.

CEIC's R&D Emphases and Basic Strategies

From its inception, CEIC has concentrated its research and development efforts on identifying ways to significantly improve the capacity for education in the inner cities by focusing on solutions. It has done so by connecting research to inner-city problems; implementing a transdisciplinary approach to research and development; and by building wherever possible on existing structures and mechanisms for widespread dissemination and research utilization, reaching out from them for input and feedback from the field.

Recognizing that cities are complex ecosystems, their economic, political, and social climates bearing directly on education, and that coordination among all elements of the ecosystem--including families, schools, and public and private sector agencies in the near and far communities--are essential to improving life circumstances and education of children and youth, CEIC's approach to addressing the ubiquitous question of "how to significantly improve our capacity for education in the inner cities" is similarly integrated, collaborative, and transdisciplinary. Thus, through merging theory and research from diverse disciplines and fields--including developmental and educational psychology; economics; sociology; urban development; public policy; counseling; curriculum, and instruction; speech, language and hearing; special education; and social work--CEIC researchers work across disciplines to seek broad, coherent patterns of linkages and collaborative working relationships with the practitioner community, researchers, and policymakers. As a result, what is tried by the educator in the schools is tied to what the sociologist tells us about changing demographics in the city, connected to what the economist observes about shifts in employment opportunities, and linked with the psychologist's findings about childhood and family stress.

CEIC's approach to transdisciplinary research and development is guided by several principles: specifically, that its efforts þ build on what is already known both through research and in school practice þ stem from collegial working relationships between researchers and practitioners þ lead to practical applications in the near term as well as sustained, coherent research, innovative development, and dissemination and utilization in the long term þ inform both practitioners and policymakers who can leverage efforts toward further implementation þ be communicated through interactive channels across disciplines and through various professional agencies

In its first five years, CEIC has established and forwarded three major research and development programs to address the fundamental question of what conditions are required to bring about massive improvements in the development and learning of children and youth in this nation's inner-city communities. They are: (a) family as an agent in the education process; (b) school factors that foster resilience and learning success; and (c) community connections with and capacity for education. Specific projects range in purpose and format from knowledge base synthesis to field-based experimentation and replication, all centered ultimately on effective educational practice and policy, and on learning success for students. The projects are designed to inform or enhance each other and are carried out in context with the others to achieve substantive coherence and cross-disciplinary vitality.

A major connecting theme of the work of all CEIC projects is the identification and description of conditions that contribute to resilience development and learning success among students from vastly diverse background and life circumstances in inner cities. Findings from CEIC's research provide a rich database for identifying processes that underlie adaptation and promote successful pathways that lead to educational resilience of students in inner-city schools, particularly those in circumstances placing them at risk of school failure.

In addition to the transdisciplinary programs of research and development, CEIC creates and tests new modes of dissemination and implementation, including: þ providing assistance to educators, parents, and others to carry out intensive microlevel research on their own þ creating a consortium of urban universities modeling how research contributes to human development and education; and improving preservice and inservice programs for teachers, social workers, and others--programs intended to model effective service to inner-city children and their families þ demonstrating well-documented ways to promote resilience and success among inner-city children and youth þ creating information on inner-city education that is relevant and usable in improvement efforts þ organizing forums for practitioners and policymakers on inner-city educational practices and policies

What CEIC Has Learned . . .

Findings from the first five years of CEIC's R&D programs point to key observations that have significant implications for shaping next-step efforts for improving our capacity for education in inner-city situations. They include the following highlights: þ The research and practical literature on inner-city life and schooling is scattered, limiting the capacity of researchers and practitioners to keep abreast of advances in theory, research, and practice. þ Research-intensive universities have exhibited a limited capacity to mount transdisciplinary research efforts and place their findings in the service of broad-based community efforts to improve the capacity to foster healthy development and educational success of children and youth in inner cities. þ The current educational system has failed in its efforts to implement what is known about effective schools, classroom instruction, and policy. This failure is especially devastating in inner-city schools where there are limited resources and families often cannot compensate for watered-down content. poor instruction;, outdated curricula, obsolete and limited technology, and poorly implemented policies. þ Federal and state governments' influence on education and related service delivery systems has been narrowly categorical (e.g., Title 1, bilingual, special education). This approach to meeting student diversity has caused disjointedness and inefficiency at local levels. The policies and their implementation have been procedural rather than substantial; too often they identify, measure, and reward problems, not solutions. Because urban schools, particularly those in the inner-city communities, are populated by diverse populations, they are disproportionately affected by the limitations of a narrowly categorical approach. þ The transition of youth from high school into the workplace or college is a crucial life passage. Most schools fail to equip students for this transition. Inner-city youth have the same desire to work as non-inner city youth, but intervening environmental factors frequently impede the fulfillment of this desire. It is critical to provide students with strategies to find work and mechanisms to facilitate employer contacts. Schools, particularly those in the inner cities, need to facilitate a smooth transition into the world of work.

Next Steps in Inner-City Education: Focusing on Resilience Development and Learning Success

Findings from CEIC's first five years suggest three essential next steps in advancing inner-city education: (a) focusing on fostering educational resilience among children and youth in a variety of highly adverse circumstances that place them at risk of school failure or leaving school unprepared for work or further learning; (b) implementing effective practices that focus directly on classrooms and homes, where learning takes place; eliminating educational segregation in schools and providing for student diversity within the context of one inclusive education system; and (c) forging greater school connections with families and the community.

What has CEIC Learned about Fostering Resilience?

Stated simply, resilience is the human capacity to overcome adversity and achieve success. CEIC researchers have found that in inner-city practice, resilience or its lack is complicated both by the variety and magnitude of conditions to be overcome and by the situations, circumstances, and contexts that might serve as resources for recovery and adaptation, especially those of family and community. Their findings indicate that resilient students share a number of salient characteristics. They tend to, for example: be proactively engaged in a variety of activities; develop strong "systems of selfhood," including strong loci of control, high self-esteem, high self-efficacy, and healthy expectations; be able to plan, change their environments, and alter their circumstances for the better; excel at solving problems; exhibit strong interpersonal skills; hold clear senses of purpose; and achieve success in learning.

CEIC studies on resilient students also consistently found that resilient students from low-SES urban backgrounds placed in the highest national quartile on combined reading and mathematics test scores. Compared with non-resilient peers, they were found to hold higher self-concepts and educational aspirations, to sense more internal controls, to interact more often with parents, and to be encouraged more often to do their best.

Schools do make a difference. Comparative studies on inner-city schools by CEIC researchers found that compared with other inner-city schools, those schools that tend to produce higher percentages of resilient students share any or all of a number of characteristics, including greater, higher, or more þ time spent in independent student work þ teacher-student interaction þ positive student perceptions of, and involvement in, school programs þ student satisfaction with schoolwork and peer relationships þ parental involvement in their childrenþs schoolwork þ teacher expectations of, and support for, students þ order and structure within the school þ student aspirations, motivation, and social and academic self-concepts.

It is also noteworthy that inner-city schools with greater numbers of students who were found to be educationally resilient tended also to enjoy ongoing, site-specific inservice programs for school staff, based on needs identified by both teachers and administrators. Resilience development is affected by a multitude of influences þ personal, environmental, attitudinal, and circumstantial. It does not result from a single precipitating event or innate personal characteristic. A fundamental strategy in fostering resilience development is to identify what is positive in spite of adversity in the lives of children, and find ways to maximize them. Resilience-enhancing programs that result in significantly improved learning among students in highly adverse circumstances seek to prevent dysfunction and, when necessary, to correct and heal. It takes into account the overlapping, multiple contexts that both challenge and encourage resilience in individual students.

What CEIC Has Learned About Effective Responses to Student Diversity

Given present demographic trends, the elementary/secondary student population of the United States will become increasingly diverse in terms of racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds; the characterization of "minority" in many regions of this country are likely to become "norm" or "majority" as we move to the next millennium. Added to the mix of ethnic and linguistic diversity, there is also an increasing need for require special, remedial, or accelerated education. CEIC's research indicates that the problem is all the more pressing in inner-city schools, where student populations already far exceed the diversity projected for the nation at large. Responsible as well for the highest number of children living in poverty, inner-city schools are expected to provide specialized programs and the social integration required to serve an increasingly and radically diverse and heterogeneous student population.

Local schools are faced with the extremely difficult challenge to adequately meet the needs of all of the diverse students in coherent and coordinated ways. Causes and solutions vary among school sites and from city to city. The influx of immigrants from Mexico and various Asian nations into Los Angeles, for example, contrasts sharply in the problems it presents with those that face the virtually all-Black schools in large segments of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Findings from CEIC's research also document that many of the procedural demands governing narrowly targeted federal and state programs burden inner-city schools with overwhelming problems of implementation. Mandated rules and regulations governing those special programs put them largely out of local control. Procedural requirements overshadow educational substance and learning progress. Further, they frustrate the accountability needed to achieve equity among children from diverse backgrounds and living in adverse circumstances.

Whatever factors are involved--and to whatever extent--from district to district and school to school, a number of disjointed and separatist "second systems" of public education have developed in most inner cities. They include special classes and schools, resource rooms, transition classes, advanced placement, and "time-out" programs, and they operate largely through extremes in tracking, ability grouping, suspension, and expulsion. Demeaning labels--retarded, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, culturally disadvantaged--are used to rationalize placing individual youngsters outside regular, mainstream classrooms. Categorical or second-system attempts to accommodate student diversity generally donþt work to student advantage. It is not unusual to find inner-city schools in which more than half the students are pulled out of regular classrooms and shunted into isolated programs.

Collaborating with a number of inner-city schools, the Center has asked how best to respond to the myriad learning needs of vastly diverse students. How can schools be restructured to ensure appropriate, meaningful, and positive education for every student? Substantial evidence suggests the conclusion that systemic changes must occur to-- þ make public schools inclusive and integrated þ organize public schools into smaller units--mini-schools, charters, or houses--in which groups of students remain together for several years of study þ step up research on the learning characteristics and needs of students, particularly those with special needs, plus research that will lead to credible systems of evaluation þ implement approaches based on what is already known about teaching and learning in schools with high concentrations of students with special needs þ shift the use of labels from students to programs þ expand programs for the most able students þ ensure inclusion and integration in the bureaucracies of government, professional organizations, and advocacy groups þ integrate current findings in general, remedial, and special education, as well as in special language learning areas, into the professional development programs of all educators þ collaborate broadly across agencies to deliver coordinated, comprehensive child and family services

Schools that are effective in responding to the needs of the increasingly diverse student populations mandate a standard of achievement in the common curriculum of the school by all students; the learning of students is supported by a blending of resources and expertise that meets the diverse needs of individual students; provide staff development and consider redeployment of school resources to support the implementation needs of teachers; and stress and reinforce overall improvement in the performance of all students, including those at the margins who require greater- than-usual support. Unfortunately, such schools are exceptions to the norm. Most present approaches to reducing educational segregation and closing achievement gaps among schools and students do not work acceptably. Allocation of federal and state resources for categorical programs must move forward from fiscal accountability to promotion of student learning. Any separation by race, gender, language background, ability, or any other characteristic must be justified by a very compelling rationale and evidence of efficacy.

What CEIC Has Learned About Connecting School, Family, and Community

As an institution, a school is embedded in a local community within even larger sociopolitical units. It is governed to some extent by each of those levels, and it draws its students and most of its resources from one or the other. It is also expected to accommodate the rules and regulations that usually accompany those resources. As students complete secondary education, they enter the labor force, the military, or institutions of higher learning.

Thus, the multilayered contexts within which schooling takes place include: (a) the levels from which resources are directed to the school; (b) the social and cultural capital brought to the classroom by its students; and (c) the opportunities that await them after they leave school. CEIC's research findings are unequivocal on at least one salient point: Working alone, neither the school, the social or health agency, nor the fundamental unit of our society--the family--is able to cope adequately with the needs of inner-city children and youth.

While general consensus holds that schools and families share responsibility for children's education, for instance, CEIC has as yet been unable to substantiate much success in efforts to involve parents as partners with the school. Overall, programs for parents reflect a conglomeration of approaches that differ in goals, formats, and levels of efforts. There is little documentation of sustained interaction of individual parents with school personnel in the service of students.

Findings from analysis of relationships between social forces and educational accomplishment in 53 major cities clearly indicate that inner-city schools are increasingly the schools of remnant populations and communities trapped by their economic irrelevance or their links to diminished labor markets. They are increasingly dependent on an overloaded and endangered fiscal base. More tellingly, the data indicate, for example, that the mean reading scores of students can be predicted by the school's aggregated rates of childhood poverty and various epidemiological problems--the more a school draws from poor neighborhoods riddled with social problems, the worse its students perform academically.

Yet, alongside the poverty and the unemployment, the street fights and drug deals, is a wealth of cultural, economic, educational, and social resources. CEIC research provides a framework for cultivating and mobilizing such resources. Data from the series of field studies indicate that no single model for forming school-family-community connections is likely to work for every community. Few educational reforms have generated the same level of ground-swelling support as a comprehensive approach to coordinated educational and related services as a focus for achieving significant improvements in student learning. Indeed, innovative and varied models of delivery have emerged from the needs of children and families in local communities across the country.

CEIC's researchers have worked closely with collaborating practitioners in establishing locally initiated research-based school-linked, coordinated, comprehensive service models in Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. One such example is a family-centered approach to addressing adolescent problems. The program focuses on family-based intervention, individual counseling, and teacher training in discouraging students from dropping out of school because of drug use, delinquent behavior, or gross truancy and failing grades. Out-of-school community agencies collaborated with the families and schools involved. Results of the project indicate the key role of family involvement apparently in keeping adolescents in treatment, a critical first step toward successful results.

Another example is the Center's Learning City Program. The program provides a systematic framework for mobilizing family, school, and community resources in collaborative support for schools, seeking to achieve three goals: þ improved student achievement, particularly for students on the academic fringe þ implementation of active learning and teaching processes documented as successful þ positive attitudes of students and staff toward the student's ability to achieve schooling success and the role of a positive school learning environment.

The program increased the ability of school personnel to identify and redeploy staff expertise and resources to treat the diverse academic and related service needs of students, including those at the margins--those requiring remediation and those who can benefit from accelerated learning accommodations. At the same time, the intervention element provided schools with community resources not ordinarily linked with educational institutions, including community revitalization efforts such as the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities, a newly established federal program as a collaborative initiative across all Cabinet agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education.

CEIC's realization that inner-city children, their families, and their schools as subsystems within much larger ecosystems has guided a number of other projects, as well. Taken altogether, they indicate that capacity for education can be expanded both in and out of school contexts by: þ Building effective mechanisms for communication, coordinated delivery of services, and mobilization of latent energies and resources within communities. þ Drawing on the local expertise of various disciplines and professionals to address site-specific concerns. þ Acting on the strong likelihood that economic segregation plays a more negative role in student learning than does racial segregation. þ Developing interactive and interdependent policy implementation that reverberates throughout a system. þ Reducing the concentration of low-income students in schools by assuring that magnet schools, for instance, are inclusive and located at strategically optimum sites. þ Linking economic and educational development efforts within cities. þ Linking academic achievement and deportment in school to better jobs after graduation, encouraging employers, for instance, to make greater use of high school performance measures in their hiring and promotion decisions.

Findings from CEIC's research on inner-city schools are also consistent with the extant research base on effective schools that indicates that when taken in isolation, most school policy is at least one step removed from the daily learning experiences of students. Lengthening a school day, for instance, does not guarantee that students in a given classroom will receive more or better instruction. Effective school policies require effective implementation by teachers at classroom and student levels. Further, meeting the social, health, and educational needs of inner-city children and their families challenges--upends--the hallowed notion that schools are the sole providers of learning. Formal coordination of family and community resources and services is absolutely essential. Though CEIC has identified a variety of innovative programs emerging across the country, all emphasize coherent and seamless child and family services. They seek to transform fragmented, inefficient systems of service delivery into networks of coordinated partnership that cross program and agency lines. No single component or practice alone can account for improvements.

Building on Existing Structures for Dissemination and Research Utilization: A Strategy for Outreach

Disconnection has been a major barrier to successful knowledge dissemination and utilization, both in terms of the substantive relevance of the information and how it is disseminated to the broad spectrum of education and related human services professionals and other stakeholders of inner-city education. Although there have been concerted efforts to improve dissemination, these efforts have had little impact on improving practice. This gap between the "state of the art" and the "state of practice" is particularly problematic in efforts to improve our capacity for education in schools with high concentrations of students from economically disadvantaged families in inner cities and rural areas.

CEIC's response to closing the chasm between the "state of the art" and the "state of practice" is to actively "reach out" and build on the resources and expertise of existing structures that extend to stakeholders. The Center, with its dual dissemination focus--to ensure that its work is known and utilized, and to receive feedback from the field for shaping and refining the work of the Center--has established connections with field-based professionals to assure that the Center addresses issues of genuine concern to individuals making everyday decisions about how to enhance the learning and quality of life of inner-city students.

A National Network of R&D Extension Stations

CEIC has collaborative "R&D extension stations" in major cities across the country, including Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. The expertise and resources of the universities in those cities, as well as their links with local schools and related agencies, have greatly enhanced the Center's ability to establish field-based projects. These R&D extension stations not only enhance the generalizability of CEIC's findings, but also demonstrate how research can be brought to bear in local improvement efforts and extend the Center's work through replication and scaling-up efforts.

Partnership with Professional Organizations

CEIC's links with the ongoing work of practitioner-oriented professional organizations has placed it in a strategic position to serve their information and utilization needs. The collaborative network also enables CEIC to help meet the goals of the various organizations. For example, the Center has worked closely with the urban initiatives and professional development activities of several organizations, including the National Education Association and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). CEIC researchers also have provided key presentations at professional seminars for researchers and for practitioners, and have participated in "What Works" presentations for NEA and the Urban Network to Improve Teacher Education; and cosponsored conferences with the Council for Exceptional Children, the Council for the Great City Schools, and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Recruitment of Expertise

The recruitment of expert input to further strengthen the institutional capability of CEIC has been instrumental in expanding the Center's impact on research, policy, and practice. A cadre of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers who are nationally known in their respective fields provide CEIC with ongoing input, and also serve as dissemination agents of the Center's work by utilizing the existing structures of their home institutions. The expert input and dissemination efforts in supporting the work of CEIC were formalized through the establishment of the National Technical Advisory Board and the National Stakeholder Advisory Board. Board members represent a range of expertise and perspectives, are drawn from all geographic regions of the country, and represent diverse backgrounds and disciplines. They include leading researchers from different disciplines; leaders from professional organizations dealing with educational policy and effective schools; state and local education policymakers; representatives of community social service agencies; businesses; and parent organizations. Board members ensure that the work of CEIC is technically sound and useful for improving practice, and ensure that its work is known and utilized in efforts by the various stakeholder groups.

Technical Assistance and Professional Development

The emphasis on and mandate for research utilization has compelled all CEIC researchers to provide technical assistance and professional development to practitioner communities. Several CEIC projects have included technical assistance and professional development as a built-in component of their research design. Field-based research projects are viewed as key elements for achieving research utilization and as ever-expanding opportunities for engaging practitioners in collaborative research. These projects use research tools to collect information on implementing interventions focused on particular improvement needs. The information they gather is disseminated to practitioners and policymakers through Center publications, workshops, and seminars. What Can Be Expected from the Future Work of CEIC?

What can be expected from CEICþs ongoing program of research? CEIC researchers and their practitioner collaborators aim to demonstrate the following through their work: þ Research and researchers do have a positive contribution to make in improving human development and learning in inner-city environments. þ Research of the kind undertaken by CEIC researchers, relating broadly to families, schools, and the total community, is useful. þ Such research can and should be connected in all possible ways across disciplines, so that broad, cohesive views and understandings emerge. þ There is a need and high potentiality at this time (a "window of opportunity") to energize University faculty and to be reconnected to the resolutions of problems and enhanced capacity for education in inner cities. þ Much benefit can be obtained from well-focused policy discussions concerning research findings and clear implications for improving inner-city life.

The ubiquitous question, "What conditions are required to cause massive improvements in the learning of children, youth, and people of all ages in this nation's inner cities?" will continue to drive and refine the work of CEIC. Today, as we look forward to the 21st century, there is a desperate need for research, dissemination, and knowledge utilization in the inner cities of the nation, with a focus primarily on human development and education. The guiding principle that our work must lead to practical applications in the near term, while pursuing long-term programs of research, innovative development, and dissemination/utilization will continue to undergird the evolving process of development and refinement of the program of research at CEIC.