All too often, we articulate goals in terms of preventing some sort of problem or ameliorating some risk factor. Forging a consensus about the positive outcomes we want our children to achieve is the first step in ensuring that all agencies and institutions involved with our young people are doing more than social "triage." Responding to problems that have already manifested themselves, while necessary, is too little, too late. At a minimum, positive outcomes must encompass the acquisition of the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for sustained success in our society. A beginning list of these necessary skills and competencies includes health and physical competency, personal and social mastery, cognitive and creative ability, vocational accomplishment, and engagement in the work of citizenship.

Systems that serve children and families in our nation provide only services for which they are held accountable. Requiring these agencies and institutions to examine their policies and procedures in light of desired positive outcomes will go a long way toward ensuring that they are actually furthering the well-being of children and youth and helping prepare them to succeed in life. Every institution concerned with children and youth should be able to demonstrate how it is contributing to the development of the full range of competencies.
 

Educators Must Contribute To An Effective System Of Supports For Children And Families That Will Ensure That All Children Are Able To Achieve These Positive Outcomes.

Every community should develop a school-linked support system for children and their families. School-linked support efforts must go beyond co-locating available services. Integration of services may solve access problems by bringing services together in a convenient location, but does not change the fundamental nature or quality of the supports available to children and families. To ensure that these systems are effective and lead to improved outcomes for young people and their families, school-linked support systems must be:

•  Responsive to the Cultural, Ethnic, and Economic Diversity of the Community. Communities should structure efforts to more effectively meet the needs of children and their families, not to meet the needs of bureaucratic structures. Available services must be sufficient in kind and number to foster the healthy development of all youth and meet the multiple needs of children and families in distress. Moreover, communities should involve those being served in planning what services will be offered and how they will be delivered. Responsiveness is enhanced when efforts are collaboratively designed and administered by public and private family-serving institutions, including citizen groups. Convening the major public and private entities in a community--the schools, social services, health care providers, and religious and other community-based groups-- increases both resources and expertise available to meet identified community needs. The involvement of a broad cross-section of community agencies and organizations also has the potential to raise public awareness of the goals of the effort and how well those goals are being met. 
• Flexible. To meet the diverse needs of children and families, as well as the needs of the community as they change over time, systems must be flexible. Staff working with children and families must be encouraged to adapt interventions to individual circumstances, rather than rigidly adhering to standardized procedures. They must have extensive knowledge of available community resources and an inclination to work across agency and organizational lines to ensure children and families are connected with those resources. Flexible support means providing services at places and times that are convenient to families. Services should be available at the home, the school, or a neighborhood center, before and after work. Increased flexibility must be accompanied by a shift to outcome-based account-ability to allow maximum discretion in how children and families are supported, while ensuring that agency and organizational goals are achieved. 
• Prevention-Oriented. Our current system of supports is structured to provide support only after problems have become severe. We must be capable of responding to families in crisis, but we must also focus on preventing serious problems from occurring and move beyond problem prevention by providing positive developmental opportunities for all children. Support systems must be built or restructured to meet the basic, developmental needs of all children and also be able to respond to specific problems of children and families in more serious trouble.
• Family-Centered. It has been said that the best social program is a strong family. School- linked support efforts must help families fulfill their responsibilities for nurturing their children. Problems confronting parents often affect their children--and the converse can be true as well. Even multiple services offered to an individual may not be helpful if the needs of other family members go unmet.

All families are in need of support at some time. Support for families can range from help in finding quality child care, to literacy training, to assistance in obtaining basic necessities such as food an(l clothing, depending on community needs and individual family circumstances. Some families will need intensive supports--income support, family counseling, parenting education, drug rehabilitation, and job training--to solve pressing problems and build the skills necessary to ensure that problems do not grow worse or reoccur. The objective is not to supplant families and informal community supports but supplement them when and where necessary to ensure that all children achieve at high levels.
 

Educators Must Integrate Efforts To Support Families And Better Meet The Developmental Needs Of Children And Youth Into Efforts To Restructure Schools. 

The goal of restructuring schools is to improve learner outcomes. To achieve this end, educators must critically examine the nature of schooling to make our education institutions more responsive to students' needs. Efforts to restructure schools must take into account the necessity of working with the community to create an overall environment that is conducive to learning and that prepares youth for employment, family formation, and other adult responsibilities. Changes in school governance, curricula, professional roles for educators, accountability mechanisms, and the quality of interactions with families must occur if we are to rise to the challenge of creating such an environment
 

These Changes Must Take Place As Part Of A Larger National Effort To Ensure Equitable Opportunities And Outcomes For All Children.

Efforts to support families and ensure positive outcomes for all children and youth will be successful only if we undertake them in the context of a society that is willing and able to afford all children the rich and diverse developmental opportunities and choices they need to succeed in life. Making such support services available will require investing scarce public funds equitably and fairly.

As a nation, we must develop a consensus about what we consider to be a reasonable investment in families and children. We must make a commitment to allocate resources in a way that will ensure all children and youth achieve the same high levels. Our national economic, education, employment, health, housing, and human service policies must support the provision of extra, but necessarv supports to certain individuals in order to ensure all succeed. In some cases, unequal distribution of resources will be required to achieve equitable results.  

Strategies for Change

To make the most of our investment in the education of our nation's children, educators must work collectively with all those who touch the lives of children to ensure they are afforded the opportunities and support needed to become productive, contributing members of society. State education agencies can demonstrate their commitment to the principles described above by embracing the following strategies.

• Cross-Sector, Outcome-Based Accountability. We need new systems of interagency accountability for outcomes such as high-level learning and the attainment of other competencies crucial for success in American society. Educators are making great strides in developing accountability systems to ensure that all children are achieving academic competence. However progress toward measuring the acquisition of skills and competencies in other critical areas is lacking. Currently we cannot easily track whether our children are becoming good citizens, adopting behaviors that will ensure future health, or developing an understanding of the value and function of work in our society. Without good indicators of progress toward these desired outcomes, accountability remains elusive. Ideally, every community should have a system for holding schools, human service agencies, and other community organizations accountable for seeing that their combined efforts result in the achievement of agreed-on positive outcomes by all youth. In many cases, accountability will entail revamping data collection, eligibility, and intake systems to assist agencies and organizations in jointly tracking outcomes for children and families.
• Creative Strategies for Financing Children's and Family Services. We must develop financing strategies that support the delivery of comprehensive, school-linked services for families and diverse developmental opportunities for all children. This will entail redeploying existing funding to meet the goals of a school-linked strategy. Public dollars must be employed to prevent problems before they happen as well as to provide developmental opportunities for children before they have earned the label "at risk." Funds must also be freed up for use as "glue" money for planning and administering comprehensive support and development programs that will almost certainly rely on categorical funding. Efforts to use federal funding streams to refinance services currently paid for with state and local funds must be pursued to the fullest extent possible. Financing strategies must be reviewed to assess potential increases in funding, consistency with program goals, and added administrative burden. Any money saved--for instance, by drawing down federal funds, eliminating duplication of services, preventing problems from becoming full-blown and expensive crises, or streamlining costly administrative processes such as determining eligibility--must be reinvested in additional services and for serving additional children and families.
• Local Governance Structures. We must establish ongoing, interagency mechanisms for developing and implementing coherent, cross-sector strategies to achieve challenging goals and positive out-comes for children and families. To ensure that available resources are used effectively to support children and families, communities must identify or establish a local authority, spanning education, human service, and community organizations. Such a governing body should be responsible for forging agreement on desired out-comes for children and families, developing new support systems and developmental opportunities to help achieve those outcomes, coordinating fiscal strategies and resource allocations to provide support, and holding agencies and organizations accountable for achieving agreed-on goals.
• Professional Development. We need new systems of training at all levels to ensure that teachers and other frontline workers, administrators, and policymakers are able to transform the present system. School-linked support systems will require a cadre of individuals who are able to build trusting relationships with children and families, work comfortably across professional boundaries, and exercise discretion in responding flexibly to the needs of children and families to achieve desired outcomes. Administrators and policymakers will need new fiscal, management, and accountability expertise if they are to create environments that will allow more effective and comprehensive support and development systems to thrive. Institutions of higher education must ensure that their programs produce professionals with these needed capabilities. Schools of education, public health, social work, and other professions should develop a common core of training for all those entering professions that serve children and families. However, this alone will not be sufficient. Public and private agencies must also change their expectations of professional conduct. These changes in expectations must be accompanied by a new capacity to assist current employees in developing the skills necessary to function in systems that are reoriented to reach specific, positive outcomes for children and families through flexible means.
• Changes in the Nature of Schooling Schools should reevaluate their policies and programs and change them where appropriate to reinforce the goals underlying the provision of support to families and increasing developmental opportunities for children. For instance, the availability of health services should be accompanied by a comprehensive K-12 health curriculum that provides students with the knowledge and skills they need to develop health-enhancing behaviors. Health services and education should be reinforced by a healthy school environment, which includes a psychological climate conducive to learning and a safe physical surrounding. Another curriculum change might involve providing community service learning opportunities. Service learning provides for closer connec-tions between the quality of learning and the quality of life in the community by providing experiential learning opportunities, while transforming students into community resources. Another change involves connecting school and employment. Schools must provide appropriate curricula, resources, and learning places, as well as increase their accountability for the level of students' readiness for work, if job-training and employment services are to be effective.
• Interactions with Families. Schools must be able to work in part-ership with families in a supportive, culturally competent manner that builds on families' strengths. If school-linked efforts to support families are to be effective, schools and other participating agencies must look critically at the assumptions that underpin the way they interact with families. It is not enough to simply recognize cultural and linguistic diversity; schools must accommodate and respond to the values and cultures of the families they serve. Staff attitudes and expectations may need to change, to create school environments where families feel that their contribution to their children's education is valued.
• Youth Development Opportunities. Diverse opportunities for developing competencies that complement and reinforce academic competencies must be available to all youth. The purpose of providing these opportunities must go beyond remediating or even preventing problems--such as school failure, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy--and embrace the development of positive behaviors, such as community service, regular physical activity, leadership skills, and artistic endeavors. Schools must offer these developmental opportunities to the greatest extent possible. Schools can provide opportunities for participation in music, sports, art and drama; chances to take on meaningful leadership roles in the school community; opportunities in the classroom to develop problem-solving, communication, conflict-resolution, and decision-making skills; and opportunities for seeking guidance from caring adults. Where it is impossible for schools to offer these opportunities directly, educators must join with parents and other members of the community to ensure all children and youth have access to experiences that will build the skills and competencies they need to succeed in life.  

A Call For Action

We have emphasized the importance of a community-by-community approach in ensuring the well-being of families and improving the life chances of our children and youth. However, responsibility for implementing these strategies cannot be assigned to a particular agency or level of government; it is shared by our entire nation. State government in particular has a crucial role to play.

State government is uniquely positioned to see that relationships across sectors and among the various levels of government are reoriented in ways that improve outcomes for children and their families. Guaranteeing the success of all young people and their families will require exceptional organization of the resources controlled by different agencies and organizations at the federal, state, and local levels. Thus, in addition to bringing coherence to state-level efforts, state agencies must ensure that collaboration extends vertically as well. State governments must work with localities and the federal government to develop systemic plans that will undergird collaborative action. These plans must specifically outline responsibilities at all levels of government for assuring consistent and productive mobilization of resources.

Working closely with the federal government will be particularly important in bringing coherence to the federal, state, and local contributions in a seamless system of supports for families. Federal legislation and rules often dictate the way resources can be applied at the state and local levels. We must ensure that federal programs contribute to an overarching strategy that Strengthens families. In many cases, this will entail working with the Congress and the Executive branch to reform and decategorize federal funding streams to provide greater flexibility at the state and local levels. Stronger linkages must be built among Chapter 1, Head Start, and other programs serving children and families. We must carefully examine proposed legislation to determine how it advances our goal ol success for all.

If collaboration is to prove a truly effective strategy for improving outcomes for all children and families, state government must establish a vision and implement standards. State government must then take the lead in developing routines and practices that promote collaboration to reach that vision. Whether by executive order or legislative mandate, state governments must require and reward collaborative, cross-sector planning and implementation of services for children and families. Through assignment or assumption of responsibility, state agencies must take the lead in seeing that collaborative action results in the achievement of specific goals and outcomes. Over time, such leadership will institutionalize the process of jointly conceiving and implementing strategies to realize common goals for children and families.

State agencies must stay informed about strategies that other states are employing to improve services and support through collaboration. Activity in this area is becoming widespread and a number of states are experimenting with policies and practices that are showing early signs of success. Many may be transferable to other states with appropriate modifications to meet unique local and regional circumstances.

 If collaboration with other systems is to become deeply rooted, state education agencies and other state agencies concerned with children and families must systematically reassess their internal organizations, practices, and use of resources. This analysis should result in a strategic plan to ensure that each agency is contributing as efficiently as possible to an over-arching system of support. Individual agency decisions should be made with consideration of shared goals and reciprocal effects of actions. State agencies must seek points of leverage--in funding streams, staff development, connections among key leaders, information management, and governance structures--that will allow models of successful, innovative practice to become standard operating procedure.

Rethinking state-level connections and the structure of state agencies has the potential to create a climate in which local efforts to support children and families can thrive. However, state agencies must take direct action to help communities redesign local service delivery systems as well. Some communities may need encourage-ment to recognize the value of undertaking the difficult process of offering a broad, coherent, and flexible array of services and opportu-nities to young people and their families. States must ensure that all communities--particularly those most hesitant to address pressing problems--have the resources and expertise available to meet the challenges of implementing the strategies we have outlined. State government must observe the results of local efforts, staying alert for difficulties and challenges that cannot be easily overcome at the local level. The state's monitoring effort must be accompanied by a willingness to change the way state agencies operate and allocate resources, as appropriate.

Communities will need technical assistance in creating support systems that are responsive, flexible, prevention-oriented, and family-centered. Technical assistance can be provided either by a consortium of state agencies or the formation of public/private intermediary groups. Regardless of how such efforts are structured, state agencies must ensure that their staffs have the requisite levels of fiscal, organizational, and political expertise to assist communities in devising individualized strategies to improve the nature and quality of the support afforded to children and families. Agency directors, managers, and program staff who are responsible for providing technical assistance will need to learn new skills and learn how other systems operate. Position descriptions and performance evaluations will need to be altered to reflect new responsibilities.

Assistance provided by states will necessarily vary according to local needs. State government can provide funds or help communities obtain foundation funds for use as start-up money to lay the groundwork for local efforts. State agencies can serve as clearing-houses to disseminate information, link similar initiatives, and connect local efforts to needed expertise.

Many communities will want help developing positive outcomes and indicators that can be employed at the local level. Although these outcomes should not be imposed from above, neither should every community have to start from scratch in developing outcomes and indicators.

Individual states should provide leadership in setting standards of well-being and achievement for all young people against which all appropriate agencies and organizations can be held accountable. These individual state efforts should build on and be integrated with national work on defining and developing indicators and measures of school readiness and other aspects of well-being and achievement (e.g. the National Education Goals, KidsCount). Each state should also develop regular data collection and reporting procedures to track the overall condition of children statewide. Management information systems can also be used at the state and local levels to monitor progress toward positive outcomes and to inform changes in state and local policies and programs.

State government must look toward converging categorical funding streams, lessening administrative burdens such as eligibility determination and shifting public dollars into preventive and developmental services. In many cases, this will entail Working with the federal government to reform and decategorize federal funding streams. State government can also waive regulations inhibiting cross-sector activity, as long as waivers do not infringe on civil rights. To increase local options further, states can seek waivers in the administration of federal programs. States may also consider providing statutory authority to form local governing bodies empowered to implement collaborative strategies to improve the well-being of children and youth. Care must be taken, however, to ensure that deregulation strategies do not result in a net loss of services or decreased accountability.

To a large extent, a locality's ability to ensure improved outcomes will depend on its capacity to rise to the organizational and institutional challenges posed by collaborative efforts to improve community support systems. New systems of preservice and inservice training are needed so that local policvmakers, administrators, and practitioners can successfully operate decentralized, flexible programs. State agencies, along with institutions of higher education, should jointly develop training programs that cut across organizational and professional boundaries. Training programs must promote sensitivity to the diverse needs of families and ensure that professionals have the same high expectations for all children.  

Conclusion

The Council of Chief State School Officers is dedicated to assuring that all students succeed in life. Improving the quality of American education is crucial if we are to achieve this objective. Student success, however, can no longer be seen solely as a function of academic achievement. The social and economic imperatives of the 1990s require joint action by all those concerned with the well-being of our nation's children and youth.

An unprecedented opportunity exists for developing a common vision of what we as a nation want for our children and for mobilizing our collective resources to realize that vision. This opportunity is enhanced by a climate of reform among the systems that serve our nation's children and families. We will continue to work closely with other organizations and individuals concerned with the well-being of children and families to promote more strategic and systemic approaches to improving outcomes for all Americans. We are committed to bold, collaborative action to fulfill the promise of the principles and strategies offered in this statement and thereby guarantee the futures of all of our nation's young people.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nationwide, nonprofit organization composed of the public officials who head the departments of public education in the 50 states, five U.S. extra-state jurisdictions, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Dependents Schools. The Council has functioned as an independent national council since 1927 and has maintained a Washington office since 1948. CCSSO seeks its members' consensus on major education issues and expresses their views to civic and professional organizations, to federal agencies, to Congress, and to the public. Through its structure of committees and task forces, the Council responds to a broad range of concerns about education and provides leadership on major education issues.

Because the Council represents each state's chief education administrator, it has access to the educational and governmental establishment in each state and to the national influence that accompanies this unique position. CCSSO forms coalitions with many other education organizations and is able to provide leadership for a variety of policy concerns that affect elementary and secondary education. Thus, CCSSO members are able to act cooperatively on matters vital to the education of America's young people.

The CCSSO Resource Center on Educational Equity provides services designed to achieve equity and high quality education for minorities, women and girls, and for the disabled, limited English proficient, and low-income students. The Center is responsible for managing and staffing a variety of CCSSO leadership initiatives to assure education success for all children and youth, especially those placed at risk of school failure.