School-Linked Services Types Of Services And Organizational Forms
By: Steve Patterson
Submitted: 2010-09-16 09:50:38 | Word Count: 942
There has been a rapid expansion of coordinatedservices efforts throughout the United States since the late 1980s. Solid historical roots can be found in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, as well as some of the Great Society interventions of the 1960s. However, the aggressive development of a system of coordinated services for children and families in need received its major impetus in the late 1980s in reports of some service-needs conferencing, the results of some early experimentation, and in reports of the conditions of children and families in poverty. Two of the most influential documents were The Conditions of Children in California (1989) by Michael Kirst and Joining Forces (1989) by Janet Levy and Carol Copple.
The spread of children's services programs, from the late 1980s on, was so rapid that by 1993 one of its foremost advocates, Sharon Lynn Kagan, was claiming that efforts were "blossoming across the country from Maine to California" (Kagan and Neville, p. 78). Such "blossoming" had already received a solid boost from state legislation in New Jersey (1988), Kentucky (1990), and California (1991); with each establishing statewide family services programs.
In 1993 in the American Journal of Education, Robert Crowson published the first in a series of coauthored inquiries into issues surrounding the administration and organization of school-based services. Drawing on the available reports, handbooks, evaluations, and case studies of the time, it was observed that an array of institutional realities presented a difficult, uphill climb for service coordination. Among the problematic elements were matters of professional control and turf; organizational disincentives to collaboration; legal and budgetary dilemmas; communications and confidentiality barriers; questions of governance and managerial support; and reconceptualizations of professional or organizational roles.
Through the 1990s additional reports and analyses continued to document the deep administrative problems encountered by those attempting to coordinate services. A substantial blow to the movement in the United States occurred in 1994 when the Pew Charitable Trust announced the termination of its then sizeable support of school-linked family centers. The Trust's decision came on the heels of some weak evaluation results.
[ advertisement ]
Just a year later, an assessment by Julie White and Gary Wehlage of the New Futures initiative, then funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, added fuel to the no-effects fire. Among the most damaging of the findings was the observation that the outreach programs were invariably of the from-the-top-down variety, and that they ignored family and community expressions of service needs, depending instead upon professionally identified definitions of client need.
However, none of this bad press stopped, or even slowed, the movement. The notion of coordinated services has continued to increase in popularity into the twenty-first century. In a 1997 survey of school-based and school-linked initiatives across some forty states, Mary Driscoll, William Boyd, and Crowson found a particularly heavy emphasis nationwide upon programs in parenting education, family support and advocacy, and family health services. A surprising finding was that nearly a third of the programs surveyed in 1997 reported efforts in employment-related services for families, a feature not highlighted in the existing literature on service integration. Perhaps the greatest growth, however, continues to be in the specialized area of health services. Indeed, another survey in late 2000 reported a more than ten-fold increase during the 1990s in the number of school-based health clinics in operation across the United States.
Current Directions in Service Provision
Amid its continuing growth, a conception of the central problem behind much of the services effort has undergone a bit of change. The talk of a dangerously fragmented delivery system, and of the need for a heavy emphasis upon the coordination of children's and family services, has declined. Coordination, it has been discovered, is exceptionally hard to do. Instead, in the United States, there has been a reduced focus upon interagency cooperation and a greater emphasis upon the provision of an array of services, coordinated or not.
There has also been less attention paid to school-centered programs of family assistance. Instead, efforts have gone toward the development of a much greater variety of forms and strategies for outreach, including neighborhood organization–led programs, communities-of-faith efforts, private-sector interventions, and many more school-linked, rather than school-based, programs. Finally, activity in the services movement has been directed toward efforts that bridge pedagogically between schools and families and communities–particularly with programs of after-school activities and after-school tutoring, youth development and assistance programs, summer schooling, arts and music education, and day care.
This changed direction is finding roots in a sense of the ecology of community development activities, as opposed to programs of family assistance. Although interest continues in interagency partnering, the focus has increasingly been on community action rather than the delivery of professional services to a poverty-area clientele.
Lizbeth Schorr, nationally known advocate for children and youth, has argued in favor of this new paradigm, claiming that the added delivery of professional services by themselves falls far short of the full scope of efforts needed to strengthen families and improve learning opportunities in low-income neighborhoods. As Schorr puts it, people increasingly recognize that educational success necessitates a key place for the school "at the table where community reform is being organized" (p. 291).
There have been a number intellectual shifts of consequence in the movement toward a community development approach to family assistance. First, the concept of social capital has grown in importance and application. Much influenced by the work of James Coleman, social capital has, over time, become central to the rationale underlying coordinated services. The claim is that critical cultural resources and supports, as well as so-called hard resources through direct assistance, are passed from institutions to families in full-services programming.
