The CEIC Review 6(1)

January, 1997

The Urgency for Action: Reflections on the National Invitational Conference on Development and Learning of Children and Youth in Urban America

Neighborhood Initiatives, Community Agencies, and the Public Schools: A Changing Scene for the Development and Learning of Children

Children from Zero to Six in Urban America: Challenges and Opportunities to Foster School Success

Revitalizing Inner Cities: Focusing on Children's Learning

Service Coordination Across Government Agencies

Nothing can be counted as progress in a community until the children and youth are well-served and show healthy development and steady, sustained advances in learning. The needs of children and youth in inner-city communities are very great, yet these communities continue to receive too little attention in most places. Even in those urban areas where major revitalization initiatives such as the Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities (EZ/EC) projects have been put into place, disinvestment of all kinds—economic, professional, and social—is the pattern, and fractionation across agencies, professional societies, and bureaucracies is pervasive.

When children and youth lack the care they need, when they see too little progress and promise in their own lives as well as in their families and neighborhoods, they lose the hope of and motivation for schooling success. Human development and education must be key considerations in sustainable economic and community development efforts in our nation's inner-city communities.

Leadership in developing an overarching positive "vision" of what can and should be done for children and youth in urban America is critical. Articles in this issue of The CEIC Review provide a synopsis of the proceedings from a national invitational conference focusing on such a vision. Knitzer reviews strategies which support our nation’s youngest children and their families; Boyd, Crowson, and Gresson compare two community revitalization approaches; White and Hansen-Turton make recommendations for service coordination across government agencies; and Wang, Haertel, and Walberg describe the need for coordinated service programs which foster educational and developmental resilience.

The "Development and Learning of Children and Youth in Urban America" conference, held on October 2-4, 1996 in Washington, DC, was sponsored by the National Center on Education in the Inner Cities in collaboration with the EZ/EC Task Force of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The highly diverse participants at the conference offered views of what produces the healthy learning and development of children and youth and highlighted efforts to revitalize the inner cities of our nation. Conferees expressed both shared needs and prospects for the future amid their multiple perspectives.

Shared Needs

Conferees communicated a strong need for deep and true collaboration at all levels, above all for collaboration in direct work with children and families. Conference participants pointed out that the most important decisions in revitalization work should be made at the neighborhood level, and that strategies should be replicated through careful consideration of the developments which are most sensible for each unique site. However, plans for accountability and technical assistance should be coordinated at higher or more general levels. The need for technical assistance is especially pointed in areas such as leadership, achieving collaboration, program evaluation, and accountability. Mutually assistive strategies forge a collaborative process that can result in significant advances in local sites and subsequent scaled-up efforts. Successful work at a given site should lead to the use of staff as consultants to staff at other sites, using all possible methods of communication—print, electronic, face-to-face meetings, and sustaining technical assistance.

Conferees called for the resources of urban universities to be drawn into the work of community revitalization through (a) the creation of new cross-disciplinary units in the academy that are aligned with the broad range of activities which constitute community revitalization efforts; (b) the alteration of perspectives and roles for university personnel; and (c) renewed commitments for researchers to enter inner-city neighborhoods as true partners with the community. Revised procedures for rewarding university personnel for community work were considered essential.

Conferees also noted that collaboration should extend to professional societies also, where leadership and coordination across associations are necessary in order to examine the needs of children in inner-city communities and design and implement effective programs.

Finally, implied in the idea of local decisionmaking is that funding offered by federal and state agencies should be as open and flexible as possible, emphasizing a field-initiated orientation rather than narrowly categorical and top-down funding streams.

Next Steps: A Starter

Conferees noted that while community revitalization efforts are beginning to stir commitment and activities in many places, most of this increased activity suffers from a lack of clarity as to shared goals, starting points, and connections with other agencies and associations. Finding practical ways to join together to launch coordinated services has posed major implementation problems for those involved in efforts to improve the life circumstances of children and youth living in the inner city. A leadership mechanism for networking is called for to advance a broad-based initiative to revitalize our nation’s inner-city communities and to foster the development and learning of urban children and youth. The next-step "starter" tasks recommended by the conferees include the following examples:

• Cause the consolidation of resources across all government departments in support of projects such as the EZ/EC initiative.
• Help to create visibility for community revitalization projects such as the EZ/EC initiative, and assure the projects’ credibility and growth by culling resources of the highest quality and advancing public awareness of good work. Media contacts are important as a way of building public understanding and support.
• Meet with university leaders and representatives of professional associations to fire the "starter signal" for formation of cross-disciplinary teams of researchers and field-based professionals to join with community leadership for broadly coordinated efforts to address the situations of children and youth in economically distressed urban communities.
• Lead the way across federal departments in forming a broad pool of research and document funds to be available only for projects of cross-disciplinary design conducted in collaboration with people and agencies in urban America.
• Challenge every federal department and all state governments to double and redouble resources devoted to enhancement of the life and learning situation of urban children and youth.

While there are major challenges and problems of both will and practical know-how as we try to make urgent repairs in the life and learning of inner-city children, there are significant signs of readiness to respond if only we can find ways to assemble all stakeholders at the starting line, organize the necessary resources, and signal that the journey is beginning.

The United States is seeing two contemporary urban reform thrusts developing in parallel: the drive toward coordinated children’s services (full-service schools) in public education on the one hand, and toward an economic and social regeneration of poor neighborhoods on the other. Each of these movements promises to be comprehensive, multifaceted, and integrative, yet they currently have little impact on each other. What are some key differences in assumption, structure, and impact between these two reform strands? How compatible is urban school reform with the neighborhood revitalization thrust, and how can revitalization efforts in urban communities support the work of the public school?

Three perspectives frame the movement toward coordinated children’s services: a new sense of "ecology" that school, family, and community are vitally interdependent; a recognition of the need to build the "social capital" of families and communities; and a call to end the extensive fragmentation in service delivery. The community revitalization approach focuses on family self-sufficiency and independence through employment, a renewed encouragement of private investment in urban communities, and a locally or grassroots-driven strategy of action.

Outreach to children and families is by no means incompatible with notions of community development through enterprise. Nevertheless, there are basic ingredients of the approaches that differ. The fundamental strength of coordinated services approaches is that they directly provide for the basic needs of low-income families. However, direct service programs also bear a history of "top-down" execution and professional-centeredness, rather than a focus on community needs and leadership. This history has meant that the call for parental involvement, long recognized as essential to children’s successful learning, has not translated into families being in comprehensive and equal partnership with schools.

The strengths of urban renewal initiatives include incentives toward self-reliance, labor, and local development, and a focus on the broad-based issue of economics. Critics of market-driven concepts such as the Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities (EZ/EC) initiative point out, however, that it is problematic to ask those with the least capital and fewest institutional resources to revitalize their own communities, and that market forces typically have not successfully gathered "have’s" and "have-not’s" together to address the needs of the community.

Both/And, Rather Than Either/Or

Alone, neither coordinated services nor plans for economic revitalization will significantly improve the learning and healthy development of children and youth in the inner cities. The various strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches should lead policymakers toward neighborhood revitalization approaches which emphasize both professionalized delivery of services to families side-by-side with economic development. The following are suggestions toward merging the strengths of both approaches:

• Services to families and children must develop with the full involvement of parents and the community. There must be continued movement toward empowered, co-equal participation of families with professionals in governance and development of schools and the neighborhood. At the same time, the schools and children’s learning must remain central issues and must not be sidelined as expected by-products of employed families and improved economic conditions.
• The local school should be recognized as a tangible part of the "basic industry" of the city, with economic and community development responsibilities that go well beyond mere service delivery. It may now behoove the public school to go beyond its traditions of child learning and development, toward a more broadly-conceived role as an active player in the much larger, full-scale development of its community. More than a "service" outreach center, the local school could become a cooperating "investor," maintaining its emphasis on the 3R’s while working extensively with community development agencies and other centers for the family service, such as neighborhood businesses, religious institutions, and civic and governmental agencies. The school’s role as an employer and purchaser of goods/services must be reevaluated as well. Every school contributes to its community through, for example, the provision of lunches, health examinations, and school-age day care. Considering the school’s own accumulation of professionally credentialed "social capital," there tends to be only a minimal understanding among educators that they too are part of a community-based enterprise.
• Powerful neighborhood revitalization strategies proceed from the recognition of the interconnections between economic and social, individual and collective, and adult and child well-being. Market solutions assume that people will respond to incentives and utilize opportunities. However, among populations that have long been excluded from the established economy, such assumptions may not be warranted, and the development strand of reform must take these factors into account. Conversely, initiatives for full-service schools must remain aware of the incentive structures—i.e., children are unlikely to remain in school when they doubt its efficacy to help them, seeing that few around them are able to obtain regular work—which vitally affect the schools’ own success.

What do these ideas mean for school reform? Schools might tackle issues such as employment options and training, a neighborhood’s attractiveness to investment capital, and adult education, as well as partner with both family "welfare" forces and economic institutions including banks, retail businesses, and insurers. Public schools could be transformed into "enterprise schools," joining with an array of other neighborhood and city institutions in the development and regeneration of the school’s total local ecology and the city itself.

Three actualities emerging from recent research indicate that we must focus concentrated attention on low-income children before they enter school: (a) poverty among young children is becoming more intense; (b) poverty coupled with other risk factors, such as chronic neighborhood violence and high stress from urban living, places young children at great risk of negative outcomes; and (c) early intervention with both children and their families can mitigate the effects of poverty and other risk factors and can enhance learning- related outcomes.

Much of the intervention research focuses on preschoolers, but a new generation of inquiry focusing on infants and toddlers indicates that intensive child development and early education interventions starting in infancy can result in significantly improved academic and developmental outcomes. Further, evidence from research indicates that the strongest interventions include comprehensive frameworks that focus on both the child and the family, combined with efforts aimed at changing community risk factors. Unfortunately, access to such programs is limited, especially quality programs available to low-income families.

Examples of nationally recognized program models include Home Instructional Program for Preschool Youngsters, Healthy Families America, Parents as Teachers, and Head Start. At first glance, approaches which deliver services through home visiting, family support, parent education, and prekindergarten classes seem quite different. Indeed, even within program type there is great variation from one state to another in the specific characteristics of the program supported, eligibility criteria, and access to training. And yet, across the country, an interesting pattern is emerging. Single strategy approaches (parent education, child care alone, pre-K programs without a family component) are giving way to more complex, interrelated, and comprehensive efforts designed to meet both child-focused needs and family- focused needs. Increasingly, all early childhood programs reflect four shared functions:

• Fostering healthy, age-appropriate child skills and competencies.
• Enhancing adult skills and competencies.
• Nurturing parent-child relationships and understandings of how children develop.
• Helping families access specialized services when necessary.

Designing and Supporting Strategies for Healthy Development of Young Children in the Inner Cities

Given the growing population of urban children under six in the United States who live in families at or below the poverty line and the movement toward comprehensive strategies in order to address their pressing needs, there are four special design and implementation issues for initiatives involving young inner-city children and families.

First, program strategies must be responsive to the harsh realities of living in poverty at the same time that they are consistent with principles of adult and child learning and development. Strategies need to be strength- based, as opposed to being based in a philosophy of deficit, while acknowledging the very difficult problems facing families which make daily survival an issue.

The second imperative that also grows out of the realities of inner-city life is the need to focus not only on children and families, but also on neighborhood issues. Linking with or creating forums for mobilizing action, such as the long-standing Head Start approach to family involvement, produces opportunities for families to address neighborhood and community-based issues. Strategies that build the leadership capacity of family members involved with the program, through participation in all aspects of program activities (including involvement in research projects, governance, etc.), also ensures a broadened focus that includes neighborhood issues.

A third imperative for inner-city initiatives is to deliberately create strategies to return income to the community, whether through individual program job generation, links with larger community development mechanisms, or other approaches. Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities seem particularly useful in developing some of these strategies because community reinvestment and development is so central to their mission.

A fourth imperative is to focus careful attention on building a system of supports and services for young children and families, not just a series of programs and program-by-program case managers. This requires building a broad community network, including, for example, community leaders, families, Head Start teachers, informal care providers, well-baby clinics personnel, managed care providers, and court personnel. Such community networks should address more technical service integration issues and serve as a link with larger community forums for addressing economic issues and monitoring the impacts of devolution and welfare changes at the most local, neighborhood level. These imperatives can direct current opportunities to craft "street smart" interventions for young children and their families.

We can rekindle hope for schooling success of the diverse students schools today are challenged to serve only if we can find the means of magnifying the "positives" of urban life. Meeting this challenge requires knowledge of what influences student learning as well as policies and programmatic approaches that place healthy development and educational success at the forefront of community revitalization efforts. One such programmatic approach, described in this article, is collaborative school-linked services which utilize the knowledge base on student learning.

The Research Base on Learning and Resilience

Influences on Learning. An extensive research base exists on what influences learning that reveals practices which promote healthy development among children and youth who live in high-risk circumstances. Findings from a synthesis of the past 50 years of educational and psychological research on learning, combined with a large-scale survey of judgments of educational practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, indicate that the most powerful influences are found in contexts which affect learners directly, i.e., students’ cognitive abilities, motivation, and behavior; classroom management and climate; student-teacher interactions; amount and type of classroom instruction; and the home environment. Teacher-administrator decisionmaking, the community, and out-of-class time show moderate influences on learning. State, district, and school policies, which affect learners more indirectly, are among the least influential categories. These findings suggest that policy, even that which is carefully developed and addresses a significant problem, is unlikely to make a difference in student learning unless it directly influences classroom instructional practices, home environment, and parental support.

Educational Resilience. Resilience as a psychological construct provides an integrative framework for interpreting individual and institutional resources that can be cultivated and mobilized to mitigate the effects of personal vulnerabilities, risks, and environmental adversities. Studies of children who thrive despite detrimental sociocultural circumstances provide evidence of an "immunizing" factor that can mitigate against life’s adversities. Research indicates that this immunizing factor is the availability of support systems that connect the contexts surrounding the family.

Policies and Approaches that Focus on Children’s Learning

Recent Federal Policies. The service delivery system currently in place for serving children and families in the United States is fragmented and inadequate for meeting the physical, social, and learning needs of today’s children and youth, especially those beset by significant adversities. Recently enacted federal policies have been advanced as partial solutions to this lack, including the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), and the Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities initiative (EZ/EC). These federal policies share two focuses. First, each concentrates on creating a positive climate that supports learning. For example, Goals 2000 sets high academic standards for all students; Goals 2000 and IASA promote safe and drug free educational environments; and EZ/EC provides support for education and sustained economic development of local communities. Second, each emphasizes the value of school-family-community partnerships as a means of creating positive climates, encouraging parental involvement in the schools, and forming partnerships among schools, families, and communities.

Forging School-Family-Community Connections for Student Success. Among the proliferation of programs designed to improve the lives of children whose circumstances place them at risk, collaborative school-linked services programs—which help promote the educational accomplishment of children by providing access to medical, psychological, economic, and educational resources in coordinated and accessible ways—are some of the most promising and widely implemented. Despite intense interest, however, little research has been conducted about the effectiveness of school-family-community programs. A recent evaluation of collaborative programs identified five guidelines for successful implementation of collaborative school-linked services: (a) collaborative planning procedures, (b) focus on the client, (c) promotion of interprofessional collaboration, (d) adequate allocation and deployment of resources, and (e) implementation of powerful, research-based instructional practices.

A Comprehensive Approach: The Community for Learning. The Community for Learning Program (also known as the Learning City Program) developed by CEIC implements a framework for coordinated services delivery that attempts to incorporate these guidelines. The Community for Learning (CFL) is a collaborative process that unites various groups and resources in school restructuring efforts. However, unlike many earlier collaborative school-linked programs, CFL includes curriculum, instruction, classroom management, and school organization as central design elements of a comprehensive program of service delivery that places healthy development and school success at the core of reform efforts.

The key program components of CFL are listed below:

• A site-specific implementation plan that takes into account schools’ program improvement needs, students’ learning characteristics and needs, staff expertise and staffing patterns, curriculum standards, instruction, assessments, and other implementation-related concerns.
• A schoolwide organizational structure that employs teaming of regular and specialist teachers in the planning and delivery of instruction in the regular classroom setting.
• A staff development plan, based on a needs assessment, that provides ongoing training and technical assistance tailored to the needs of individual staff members and program implementation requirements.
• An instructional learning management system with a focus on student self-responsibility.
• An integrated assessment-instruction process that provides an individualized learning plan for each student, using multiple approaches such as whole-class and small-group instruction, as well as one-on-one tutoring, based on an ongoing analysis of student needs, resources, and expediency.
• A school-family-community involvement plan to enhance communication among partners and to forge a partnership of equal responsibility that promotes schooling success.
• A school-linked, comprehensive, coordinated health and human services delivery plan that addresses the wellness, healthy development, and learning success of each student.

Results from recent implementation studies examining the impact of the CFL design in several inner-city schools show a positive pattern of academic achievement and developmental outcomes, including more positive attitudes toward learning and classroom and school environment, higher levels of aspiration for academic learning, and better academic self-concepts. Eleventh-grade students who had participated in the CFL program in middle school also showed a significantly lower dropout rate (19%) compared to their non-CFL peers (60%) enrolled in the same high school.

Lessons and Implications of Current Reform Efforts

Several implications for policy and practice can be drawn from current attempts to institute broad-based efforts to significantly improve the healthy development and learning success of inner-city children and youth:

• Program implementation must be a shared responsibility of all stakeholder groups while at the same time schools must remain the primary focus of attempts to improve education in the inner cities.
• Innovative programs and forums which aid in bringing what works to scale need to be supported.
• A system must be developed to communicate the growing body of related research findings and innovative development experiences concerning comprehensive services delivery for children as a focus for achieving significant improvements in student learning. Although implementation of coordinated approaches requires application of knowledge and expertise from many disciplines and professions, such a dissemination and sharing system does not yet currently exist among practitioners and others who play major roles in influencing the conditions and processes of education and health and human services delivery.
• Educational reform and the reform of services delivery must become aligned efforts, both in terms of design and in the forums in which they are discussed.

The common perception of inner cities is that they are communities without resources, impaired by poverty and neglect. However, urban communities also have a wealth of resources available to them, including academic institutions, cultural centers, business hubs, and health and human services agencies. The real problem is that the resources and services available in urban communities are not linked and often are highly fragmented.

In Philadelphia, for example, the quasi-governmental agency which runs job training and placement programs initially did not collaborate with other key organizations or employers in the city around their job needs. A 1993 study of the agency’s placement rate indicates that 30% of its clients obtained jobs that lasted only 90 days. In contrast, several public and private collaborations have emerged in Philadelphia which have been successful in serving families that live in severely disadvantaged circumstances, including:

• The school district’s Family Centers, which integrate and coordinate education, parenting, counseling, and health resources for children, youth, and their families through school-linked services.
• Several Philadelphia Housing Authority partnerships, such as the Leadership Task Force, which aims to improve the quality of life for the residents of public housing. The Task Force includes 42 representatives from both private corporations and civic institutions, and the collaborative Health Care Centers, which work with local health care providers to provide comprehensive health services on public housing premises.

Collaboration: Lessons from Experience

The following are critical aspects of establishing and maintaining successful partnerships:

Funding. Lack of funding is the most frequently blamed barrier to any community development program, and is often used as an excuse to avoid change and sustain the status quo. Proper planning and better budget oversight can often overcome this barrier, however, and collaboration between agencies that serve the same purpose and people can further save substantial administrative and operations costs. Although the start-up costs for integrating and coordinating services between both public and private entities can be high, these costs do not compare to the long-term savings from streamlined programs that were once duplicated across agencies.

Data Integration. Modern technology via computers makes it possible to share, accumulate, and integrate data efficiently, which in turn enables agencies to work with clients more effectively. Again, the start-up costs do not compare to the long-term savings due to this type of investment.

Turf/Interest. Each collaborative member must have a clear understanding of his/her role, as well as the expectations of him/her in the partnership. Further, mutual trust and commitment must exist between partners.

Regulation. Bureaucratic legislation has often killed excellent visions. Policies must accommodate the needs of the local communities, and may be worked with or created anew. Consolidating social, human, and health government functions, for example, may allow the new service agency to adhere to only one set of regulations, while using public funds to create comprehensive service coordination. The Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities initiative is one example of how public policy and legislation can forge partnerships.

Leadership. Passionate and personal application of top leadership to the project’s priorities is critical to the success of these endeavors. Leaders must also be able to share their visions with other key stakeholders in the community and establish consensus among all the players.