Schools have always played two roles in American society. On the one hand, they are linked to the familiar places of home, family and community; on the other, they stand as the primary institution charged with the preparation of children for the 'broader' worlds of society, polity and nation. Much of Conant's The American High School Today (1959) is focused on this second purpose, and his plan for the comprehensive high school is connected to the creation of a national agenda which held in some disfavor the benefits of localized educational perspectives. As the century closes, the merits of smaller institutions closely related to local and community priorities remain the subject of substantial debate, and the creation of alternatives to large schools sustains the interest of many different constituencies (Raywid, 1997).

Drawing on work by Casey (1993) and others (cf. Jackson ,1994; Platt, 1996; Hummon, 1992; Anderson & Gale, 1992; Hiss, 1990; and Leach, 1999) I will articulate the central features that may characterize a sense of place and argue for the utility of this concept as a lens through which to assess contemporary educational alternatives.

In the final section of the paper, the concept of place is used to frame a discussion of two current reforms for education that promise to re-imagine the connections between schools and their communities. These include (1) the integration of social services using educational sites as the primary locus of delivery ( Crowson & Boyd, 1993; Smrekar and Mawhinney, 1999); and (2) assets-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993, 1996).
 
 

Perhaps the central dilemma of American education is beautifully rendered by William Proefriedt in an article published nearly fifteen years ago entitled 'Education and Moral Purpose: The Dream Recovered.' Proefriedt (1985) remarks on the critical role that schools have played in this century as a means toward achieving the American dream of success. That dream, with its promise of equality of opportunity for all, '. . . has usually been located in the future and in the wide world out there, and yet at the same time we have seen the importance of the small town, of the local community, of one's childhood, one's past, to the fulfillment of the dream. ' (Proefriedt, 1985, p. 406.) Like the dream itself, 'The schools, too, express, this ambiguity. They are asked to play two often conflicting functions: to transmit the values of the immediate society, the small town, the local or ethnic group, to the children, and, at the same time, to introduce them to a set of skills and values that will enable them to gain entrance to the a wider world, to make their way into the future, to fulfill the dream. ' (Proefriedt, 1985,pp. 406-407.) In sum, 'The school is expected, and sometimes even by the same people, to teach the boy to live in the town, to stay off the railroad tracks, and at the same time, to put him on the train, to point him in the direction of the city.' (Proefriedt, 1985, p.407).

As he explores this ambiguity, Proefreidt invokes Thomas Wolfe, arguing that , 'No author has explored the American dialectic of the home place and the wider world at greater length and with more insight. . .'. Recalling the Wolfe's novel You Can't Go Home Again, Proefriedt articulates this paradox:

For Wolfe, the hometown is at once a source of innocence and salvation, and a place from which, to escape its meanness and parochialism, one sets out early. And the train is, at once, a 'pain of going' and 'triumphant promise.' The passage to the city is passage toward an unexpected brighter tomorrow; but for Wolfe, and for so many others, the city disappoints. It turns out to be a place of shallowness and suffering.

(Proefreidt, p. 407; cf. Wolfe 1934/68, pp. 49)

As he astutely captures WolfeÕs insight that good and evil are alloyed both in the small town we leave and the city to which we venture, Proefriedt also claims the metaphor of the train for the school itself. ' The school stands between these two ambiguous points on the American cultural landscape, the small community as both supportive and constrictive, and the city, the future as both promise and peril. ' (Proefriedt, 1985, p. 407).
 

Conant's Legacy and The Comprehensive High School

Janus-like, then, the school is the vehicle that can transport us from local worlds to the greater societal destinations beyond If the tension between these two poles has been overlooked in many educational debates, so too has their duality . I would argue that at least for the last half of this century most of our educational policy has been directed toward ensuring that the school is the train that takes us inexorably toward that larger world, and that the vision of the big city beyond has rarely encompassed both the promise and peril of which Wolfe writes. Conant (1959), standing on this side of the century's midpoint, is distinctly less sympathetic to the virtues of the 'small town,' place-rooted local perspective than he is to the ' big city,' cosmopolitan pull of the national society.

Conant does his best to explain the local flavor of our educational system from a historical perspective, asserting:

The doctrine of local responsibility and community independence can be related to our pioneer history without difficulty. Parish and county autonomy in the South, the seventeenth-century independence of New England church congregations, and suspicion of centralized government are among the factors that shaped the present political structure of our school systems in many states.

(Conant, 1959, p. 9).

But Conant is hardly enamored of this local flavor. With respect to the political systems that govern education, for example, he laments; '. . . there is no uniform arrangement. To describe with any accuracy the methods of choosing school board members and the powers of the boards in the forty-eight states, on would have to have a truly encyclopedic memory for details.' (Conant, 1959, p. 9). Indeed, the desire to inform those who exercise considerable local discretion animates the very project that took its final form in The American High School Today. As Conant notes in his statement of purpose:

Since . . . the school boards, almost without exception , do have a great degree of freedom in managing the local school, I have addressed this report in the first instance to school board members. And since in many communities the school boards are elected, I venture to hope the report may be of interest to citizens committees concerned with public education.

(Conant, 1959, p. 9).

The dominant form of secondary education is that Conant finds in this system is , of course, the comprehensive high school.

With few exceptions, for the most part in large eastern cities, the public high school is expected to provide education for all the youth living in a town, city or district. Such a high school has become known as a 'comprehensive' high school in contrast to the 'specialized 'high schools which provide vocational education or which admit on a selective basis and offer only an academic curriculum. ( Conant, 1959, pp. 7-8)

To return to our earlier metaphor, the comprehensive high school becomes for Conant a special and complicated kind of train, one that must carry many different passengers who are destined for multiple societal locations. For this reason, Conant sees it as the linchpin of the whole system, the piece on which the system's success rests. As he exhorts:

I trust I have provided at least a clue to my belief in the significance of a unique American educational institution and the importance of supporting and improving thousands of examples of this institution throughout the United States. (Conant, 1959, p. 7).

As we have noted in this seminar, at least part of the allure of the comprehensive school is rooted in Conant's sense of democracy; convinced, as he is, that post secondary education is within the desires and abilities of only a minority of students , the school becomes as place in which individuals bound for quite different destinations can rub up against one another for at least some portion of their journey. The challenge has nothing to do with changing these destinations, but rather, to ensure that all students leave better equipped for the wider world, cognizant that some will venture farther along these roads than others.

Writing at the end of a decade of peace and prosperity, Conant echoes WolfeÕs twentieth century enthusiasm for our century's accomplishments but not his skepticism. The dangers Conant sees for American education lurk not in the larger societal priorities but in the pull of the local, the place-bound. The small towns and local institutions that control American education clearly have the potential to work against what Conant believes is best. In some cases, local will is to be battled directly. The most direct target is the small school preserved by these same small towns:

If the high school is of sufficient size and located in a community where parental pressure for preparing for college is not overriding, those boys and girls who desire to pursue education beyond the high school level will be in a minority . The question arises whether, being in a minority, such students can obtain an adequate education. Stating it another way, one can raise the question whether, under one roof and under the same management, it is possible for a school to fulfill satisfactorily three functions: Can a school at one and the same time provide a good general education for all the pupils as future citizens of a democracy, provide elective programs for the majority to develop useful skills, and educate adequately those will a talent for handling advanced academic subjects--particularly foreign languages and advanced mathematics? The answer to this question would seem to be of considerable importance for the future of American education. (Conant, 1959, pp. 14-15).

Small schools do not only disadvantage the talented, he argues. Other 'minorities' may suffer as well:

The problem of protecting the interest, so to speak, of a minority in an institution arises not only in connection with the pupils who are scholastically able, but also in many schools in connection with the education of those boys who desire to make progress in learning a skilled trade during the high school years.. . I was curious to discover not only whether in a comprehensive high school the interests of the minority who are academically able were well protected, but also whether it was possible for such a school to provide a satisfactory program for developing certain vocational skills through shopwork if the state permitted the use of federal funds in the comprehensive high school.

(Conant, 1959, pp. 15-16).

Thus Conant directs a good deal of energy towards solving the 'small high school problem' (Conant, 1959,p. 80 ), convinced as he was that 'the enrollment of many American public high schools is too small to allow a diversified curriculum except at exorbitant expense' (Conant, 1959, p. 37). How small was too small?

The prevalence of such high schools--those with graduating classes of less than one hundred students--constitutes one of the serious obstacles to good secondary education throughout most of the United States. . . I believe such schools are not in a position to provide a satisfactory education for any group of their students--the academically talented, the vocationally oriented, or the slow reader. The instructional program is neither sufficiently broad nor sufficiently challenging. A small high school cannot by its very nature offer a comprehensive curriculum. Furthermore, such a school uses uneconomically the time and efforts of administrators, teachers, and specialists, the shortage of whom is a serious national problem. (Conant, 1959, p. 77).

Some seven pages of the final report make the case that for why and how these schools should be eliminated.

As we have noted often in this Seminar, Conant's emphasis on the national perspective makes particular sense when one considers when The American High School Today was published. The final report was written only five years after the landmark civil rights decision by a Supreme Court determined to overturn local preferences for segregated schools. It was published at the height of post-Sputnik fervor that energized the educational community with national visions of bolstered defense in face of international peril. Conant helped to shift educational priorities away from a consideration of the merits of the local and towards a renewed emphasis on the importance of schools in a national system of education oriented toward larger societal priorities. The structural and organizational forms that this emphasis took on in the ensuing years of educational expansion during the baby boom ensured that large, and often regional institutions dominated the American educational market for the last part of the century.

I would contend, as the century ends, that many education reformers are revisiting the very organizational form that Conant celebrated forty years ago and finding it wanting. In a special issue of the Educational Administration Quarterly, entitled "What Will Replace the Comprehensive High School," Mary Anne Raywid notes that there has been no shortage of critique for this institution, providing as well a litany of some of the alternatives that are currently working to supplant it:

...It is not as though we have failed to generate new models for a high school. There have long been innovative and successful alternative schools, and focus schools are a more recent and somewhat related genre. Moreover, if we count as a model any innovative variant that has spawned several others like itself, there are a number of them. We now have a popular career academy model combining college preparation with introduction to a career field, under the sponsorship of close school-business collaboration. There us also the somewhat similar but more targeted 'tech prep' model. And then there is the 'expeditionary learning ' model that appears the current manifestation of an experiential focus ( earlier manifested in the school-without-walls and 'Walkabout' models of 25 years ago. ) There is also the model elaborated by the Center for Collaborative Education in New York--the group of alternative school directors led by Debbie Meier and her Central Park East Elementary and Secondary schools--which has established new small high schools in New York. They have differing priorities and emphases but all emanate from essentially the same process and echo many of the same themes. Yet another model is the 'middle college high school' arrangement, which has proven so successful with disadvantaged students, with its thematic learning and close community college affiliation. The Center for Research on Students Placed At Risk is developing a new high school model for succeeding with urban youngsters, and schools inspired by the Paidea Proposal of a decade ago have yielded yet another and quite different one for what secondary education should look like. (Raywid ,1997, pp. 541-42).

I would suggest that some of the models cited above embody a rediscovery of the importance of a sense of place, rooting their reforms not just in a national agenda but also in a commitment to understanding the worlds and communities in which high schools and their students are located. I do not mean to romanticize the sense of place: recall Wolfe's observation that the small town could be petty and mean as well as a source of respite and sustenance. But I believe we have neglected the importance of these local meanings too long; have 'over-corrected,' as we worked to address the pressing social challenges that have faced us in the twentieth century. It is to this rediscovery of a sense of place, and its potential importance to education, that I turn now.

A SENSE OF PLACE

Examination of Place as an concept and efforts to articulate what is meant by a sense of place has occupied scholars across many different disciplines in recent years . Casey (1993) , while noting the critical contributions of the Heidegger and Bachelard to the philosophical study of place , remarks on the different perspectives that have been used to study place as he writes, 'A later wave, stemming from the 1970s and frankly topophiliac in character, was composed of ecologically minded geographers who attempted to reinstate place as a central category within their own discipline. A recent undercurrent of architects, sociologists, anthropologists, ethicists and theologians, feminists, and social observers is still gathering force...' (Casey, 1993, p.xv).

Similarly, Hiss (1990) notes this growing interest:

A brand-new science of place, growing up out of a body of formal research, like William H. Whyte's studies of plazas, is examining housing projects, train stations, hospitals, and sealed and sometimes 'sick' office buildings; parks, lawns and traffic-clogged streets; entrances, steps, and views from windows; meadows, fields, and forests; light, colors, noises, and scents; the horizon; small-air ions, and wind speed; and privacy. The investigators in this field include public health physicians, management consultants, architects, planners, clinical psychologists, ecologists, environmental psychologists, nature writers, political scientists, preservationists, and filmmakers. Although most of these students of place are still working separately, they have a common interest--safeguarding, repairing, and enriching our experience of place. (Hiss, 1990, pp. xv-xvi)

Even a cursory catalogue of these perspectives gleans a rich array of meanings for 'a sense of place' as well as a multitude of beliefs in importance. Tony Hiss (1990), in his Experience of Place, states simply: 'The places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become . . . Whatever we experience in a place is both a serious environmental issue and a deeply personal one.' (Hiss, 1990. p. xi).

For the sociologist David Hummon, sense of place is interwoven with notions of community satisfaction, community attachment, and community identity:

By sense of place, I mean people's subjective perspectives of their environments and their more-or-less conscious feelings about those environments (Steele, 1981). Sense of place is inevitably dual in nature, involving both an interpretive perspective on the environment and an emotional reaction to the environment. . . Whatever the balance of emotional and cognitive components, sense of place involves a personal orientation toward place, in which one's understandings of place and one's feelings about place become fused in the context of environmental meaning. (Hummon, 1992, p. 262).

The cultural geographers Kay Anderson and Fay Gale emphasize the territorial nature of place, along with its social construction. They argue that ' (t)he cultural process by which people construct their understandings of the world is an inherently geographic concern. In the course of generating new meanings and decoding existing ones, people construct spaces, places, landscapes, regions and environments.'(Anderson & Gale, 1992, p. 4).

The anthropologist Katherine Platt emphasizes the generative elements of place, along with its capacity for historical imagination:

Places capture experience and store it symbolically . Its collective meanings are extractable and readable by its later inhabitants. This symbolic housing of meaning and memory gives place temporal depth. But not only do places of experience store meaning about the past; they also are platforms for visions and plans about the future. Places of experience provision us with identity to venture forth out of this place into less certain or orderly spaces. Places of experience provide categories for managing new adventures and new cycles of old adventures. Places of experience connect the past to the future, memory to expectation, in an invigorating way. Places of experience give us a sense of continuity and energy. (Platt, 1996, p. 112).

The naturalist John Brinckerhoff Jackson discusses the ways in which self and space interact to create a sense of place:

Most of us, I suspect, without giving much thought to the matter, would say that a sense of place, a sense of being at home in a town or city, grows as we become accustomed to it and learn to know its peculiarities. It is my own belief that a sense of place is something that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom. But others disagree. They believe that a sense of place comes from our response to features which are already there--either a beautiful natural setting or well-designed architecture. They believe that a sense of place comes from being in an unusual composition of spaces and forms--natural or man-made (Jackson, 1994, p. 151).

Jackson notes wryly that sense of place 'is a much used expression, chiefly by architects but taken over by urban planners and interior decorators and the promoters of condominiums, so that it now means very little.' (Jackson, 1994, p. 157). But he also discusses at length the origin of the term, which he terms ' an awkward and ambiguous modern translation of the Latin term genius loci.' He continues:

In classical times it meant not so much the place itself as the guardian divinity of that place. It was believed that a locality--a space or a structure or a whole community--derived much of its unique quality from the presence or guardianship of a supernatural spirit. The visitor and the inhabitants were always aware of that benign presence and paid reverence to it on many occasions. The phrase thus implied celebration or ritual, and the location itself acquired a special status. (Jackson, 1994, p. 157.)

'We now use the current version to describe the atmosphere to a place, the quality of its environment,' he concludes (Jackson, 1994, p. 157.)

Jackson also remarks that few people in modern have any sense of place that is related to political space, although, at least until recently, he argues,

. . . what we have had are spaces and events related to family and the small neighborhood group. By that I mean not merely the home--which in the past was the basic example of the sense of place--but also those places and structures connected with ritual and with restricted fellowship or membership--places which we could say were extensions of the dwelling or the neighborhood: the school, the church, the lodge, the cemetery, the playing field. (Jackson, 1994, p. 158).

For others, articulation of a sense of place is impelled by the perception of loss. In his recent book Country of Exiles (1999), William starts from the assumption that there has been a ' weakening of place as a centering presence in the lives of ordinary people.' His book is ' animated by the premise that the well-being of most Americans rests on a healthy connectedness to place, and that a wearing away of such a relationship is dangerous.'(Leach, 1999, pp. 6-7).

For Leach, defining a sense of place also means discussion what it is not. 'I do not equate place with community,' he writes, ' because in recent years community has come to mean practically any group of people joined together by almost any shared characteristic (corporate, academic, racial, ethnic, sexual, and so forth). Community has been transformed into a transparent condition, barely related to concrete geographical places with histories.. . .' (Leach, 1999, p. 7). He continues: ' Place, of course, may contain or signify all these things---community, nature, property--in some measure, but its meaning is bound to a geographic reality both historical and profoundly lasting. . . . At its best, it is the collective outgrowth of our control over our own lives and destinies.' (Leach, 1999, p. 7).

The philosopher Edward Casey (1993) has undertaken extended studies of the role of place in philosophical systems. Its importance, he argues, is undeniable:

. . . It remains the case that where we are--the place we occupy, however briefly--has everything to do with what and who we are ( and finally, that we are). This is so at the present moment: where you are right now is not a matter of indifference but affects the kind of person you are, what you have been doing in the past, even what you will be doing in the future. Your locus deeply influences what you perceive and what you expect to be the case (Casey, 1993 pp. xiii).

Post modern society has lost this connection to place, Casey argues, suffering much as a consequence:

Rushing from place to place, we rarely linger long enough in one particular place to savor its unique qualities and its local history. We pay a heavy price for capitalizing on our basic animal mobility. The price is the loss of places that can serve as lasting scenes of experience and reflection and memory.

. . . As J.J. Gibson reminds us. . ."We do not live in 'space.' Instead, we live in places." So it behooves us to understand what such place-bound and place-specific living consists in. However lost we may become by gliding rapidly between places, however oblivious to place we may be in our thought and theory, and however much we may prefer to think of what happens in a place rather than of the place itself, we are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve. ( Casey, 1993,p.xiii).
 
 
 

The Central Dimensions of A Sense of Place

'(T)he qualities I associate with a sense of place: a lively awareness of the familiar environment, a ritual repetition, a sense of fellowship based on shared experience,Ó writes John Brinckerhoff Jackson (Jackson, 1994, p. 159). What else emerges from these writings the central dimensions of a sense of place? I would suggest at least four propositions for our consideration.

Place has a geographic or territorial dimension.

In many of the formulations cited above, the topographic nature of place emerges as a central feature. For Allen & Gale (1992), it has an 'inherently geographicÓ nature. For Jackson and Hummon, this dimension reflects the interaction of an individual with a particular environment. This geographic dimension roots a sense of place in a particular location, rendering it specific and endowed with the experiences and rituals associated with that location.

Places have boundaries.

Throughout his studies of place, Edward Casey repeatedly illustrates the dimensions of place by contrasting it with its opposite, 'placelessness.' To be place-less is to be, quite literally, adrift at sea; such a location, without boundaries and the means to orient oneself in geographic and temporal space, defies the very idea of what he means by place. To be in a place, to know it, means to limn its boundaries. Like the geographic dimension, this characteristic gives place a rootedness and particularity. As Leach writes:

" To be sure, the boundaries of place may, in the nature of things, 'exclude the outsider and the stranger,' as J. B. Jackson once observed in The Necessity for Ruins. But as Jackson also observed, boundaries 'stand for law and permanence,' 'create neighbors,' and 'transform an amorphous environment into a human landscape.'" (Leach, 1999,p. 179-180).

Place is embued with social and cultural meanings

Almost all of the definitions above emphasize that a sense of place socially constructed. Places embody our culture; as Jackson notes, there may be even a ritual element to them. As Casey (1993) suggests:

For the most part, we get into places together. We partake of places in common--and reshape them in common. The culture that characterizes and shapes a given place is a shared culture, not merely superimposed upon that place but part of its very facticity. Place as we experience it is not altogether natural. If it were, it could not play the animating, decisive role it plays in our collective lives. Place, already cultural as experienced, insinuates itself into a collectivity, altering as well as constituting that collectivity. Place becomes social because it is already cultural.( Casey, 1993, p. 31).
 

Place has a temporal quality, linking it to both past and future.

Finally, many of these formulations suggest that places are interwoven with experience over time. As Casey notes, 'It is by the mediation of culture that places gain historical depth(Casey 1993, p. 31-2).' Platt (1996) reminds us that this sense of history also points and directs us toward the future, suggesting that 'Places of experience provide categories for managing new adventures and new cycles of old adventures. Places of experience connect the past to the future, memory to expectation, in an invigorating way.' (Platt, 1996, p. 112).

The Utility of Place

Some of those who study place argue that only by understanding and sustaining our connections with the particular worlds of our experience can we grow to a more global understanding of the world at large and its needs. As Leach argues, 'A strong sense of place, along with the boundaries that shape it and give it meaning, not only fosters creativity but also helps to provide people--especially children--with an assurance that they will be protected and not abandoned. . . It is indisputable that children need a sense of place ( along with an acceptance of boundaries that define and establish the safeness of place) in order to become self-reliant.'( Leach, 1999, p. 179).

Moreover, continues Leach, these connections are essential if we are to build a productive and compassionate society:

Without a sense of boundaried place, finally, there can be no citizenship, no basis for common bonds to others, no willingness to give to the commonweal or to be taxed, even lightly , in behalf of the welfare of others. A living sense of a boundaried place, some kind of patriotism beyond love of abstract principles, is the main condition for citizenship.. . . This living sense always has a provincial character. It takes shape first as connections to families and friends, then to neighborhoods, towns, and regions, and finally, to the nation and the world. It is through the formation of this sense of place, beginning with the home and parents, that people develop their loyalty to place, but it only after the earliest concrete ties are formed that the bigger connections can be forged; the process cannot begin the other way around.

I would like to suggest at least two other reasons that it may be profitable to consider a sense of place in conjunction with our current examination of and attempts to improve education. The first concerns the potential of these understandings to generate insights, drawn from across several disciplines, that may provide a useful counterpoint to our dominant assumptions about schools and school systems. The language of efficiency and standardization has long been our native tongue as consider these institutions. The image of schools and their communities as rich and unique places, with deep local connections and singular sets of resources, cannot help to enrich our discourse. In this respect the development of a sense of place that has specific resonance for the educational community is similar to the re-envisioning of schools as communities that has preoccupied us over the past several years. Such a metaphor can provide a powerful alternative image to the bureaucratic icons of schooling with which we have become so familiar.

Second, there is something about the physicality or the geographic nature of place understandings that can be especially helpful as we consider schools today. I would argue that several of the dimensions of place outlined above overlap with contemporary formulations of community, including schools as communities. But this geographic dimension has often been lacking in discussions of school communities. By considering it anew we may have something to offer as we face the challenge of rebuilding a system that is in many cases characterized by crumbling, outdated and inappropriate physical facilities, too often located in crumbling communities. I mean to suggest that our attention to this dimension of school and of education is vital at this junction, and that to reconnect with a sense of place may hold the promise of some insights of worth.
 

Finally, I would like to direct our attention to a discussion of contemporary reforms and evaluate them in light of a sense of place. Each of these is a new iteration of an idea that has had currency at some other time in our history; each promise to re-imagine the connections between schools and their communities in some new and vital way. Given our seminar, I have tried to focus on reforms that are applicable to American high schools. Given the dimensions of place outlined above, then, let us consider in turn include 1) assets-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993, 1996); and 2) the integration of social services using educational sites as the primary locus of delivery ( Crowson & Boyd, 1993; Smrekar and Mawhinney, 1999.
 

Assets-Based Community Development

Kretzmann & McKnight ( 1993, 1996) argue for the support of a model of community development that they term 'asset based.' This model uses conceptual and physical mapping of communities to create images of unique collections of resources and assets. It is a model that responds to other images of communities, especially those in economically challenged areas, as collections of deficits or needs. While the model does not preclude the procurement of external resources, it originates in the development of an inventory of the community's assets generated from domicile to domicile as well as from the reclamation of institutions in service of the community.

Although this model is not specifically educational in focus, it recognizes the importance and the central roles of schools as institutions in which many vital assets are collected. As such, the model is quite directive with respect to the ways in which community developers should connect with, and eventually reconfigure, their schools. Kretzmann and McKnight outline a multidimensional map that inventories the resources of the school and connects these with the previously inventoried assets at the individual level of the school community members. The combination of these asset lists results in the potential for a 'strong, concrete, mutually beneficial partnership' between local schools and community individuals, organizations, and association. Among the strategies suggested are not only the 'capturing' of physical and personnel resources, including the school building and staff, but the development of financial and commercial relationships between the community and the school that harness the schools purchasing power as well as its ability to build and secure additional financial capacity.

This type of 'reform' may not be derived from the educational community, but--writ large--clearly has the potential to affect schools and the way they connect to their surroundings. It has many of the hallmarks, I would argue, of a plan that is deeply embedded with a sense of place. The tasks involved are not standardized or neutral but derived from a local and highly detailed assessment of the community and the school itself. Although the 'process' of development can be outlined, it runs no sure course and will vary according to the places and the spaces--physical, social. cultural and historical--that comprise its elements.

The Coordinated Children's Services Movement

There is perhaps no more passionate argument for the restructuring and coordination of social services designed to assist children at risk than Within Our Reach, Lisbeth Schorr's 1988 call to arms (Schorr, 1988) Schorr argues persuasively that unless social services designed to remedy the problems children have with respect to nutrition, medical care, housing conditions, family support, and educational services, then "rotten outcomes" such as poor health, poor performance in school, and even imprisonment are predictable consequences for poor children.

The movement to integrate the services that are delivered to children has moved beyond rhetoric into reality over the past decade; indeed, the National Governors Association 1991 report on the state of the field is entitled From Rhetoric to Action. Several states, including California, Oregon, New Jersey and Kentucky, have incorporated this strategy for reform either on its own or as a component that is integrated with a restructuring of the state's educational systems. (First, Curcio, & Young, 1994.) In many cases the school has become the obvious location for such coordination because it is seen as the central institution in most children's lives. As Louise Adler suggests, "Linking schools and social services has become a nationwide and. . . an international movement. " (Adler, 1994, p. 1).

In an attempt to delineate the common elements of most efforts, Adler notes that most definitions include the concept of local access to services at a school or neighborhood institution by families and children; the availability of a variety of services, including heath, mental health, employment, childcare, and education; collaboration among all service providers; a developmental, supportive model and a move toward the empowerment of families and community; flexibility in funding; the development of new ways of working among diverse professionals; and some requirements for change at a systemic level (Adler, 1994, p. 1).

As the movement has developed in breadth and scope, an extensive literature as emerged that documents existing efforts and (more recently) critiques the philosophical and conceptual basis for school linked efforts. (See, for example, Adler & Gardner, 1994; Haertel & Wang, 1997). Some of this work has highlighted particular issues that make genuine collaboration between school-based professionals and the community difficult. Some studies demonstrate how existing institutional beliefs can result in bureaucratic standard operating procedures that supplant more fragile norms which empower the community (Smylie, Crowson, Chou, & Levin, 1994.)

Others, arguing that these problems are more fundamental (Capper, 1994; Chaskin and Richman, 1992) have suggested that more of these programs should be located outside educational institutions and in the community itself, thereby increasing twenty-four hour access for children and their families and minimizing the status and expertise of educational professionals in these efforts.

Recent evaluations (Smrekar and Mawhinney, 1999; Driscoll, Boyd & Crowson, 1996) have documented the particularly difficult nature of inter-professional relationships in these school-based programs. Far more common than the collaboration originally envisioned is a mere co-location of services in which shared language and perspectives fail to develop. In part this is the result of structural arrangements that allow little time for prolonged interaction or deep discussions among professionals working with clients.

But I would argue that it precisely the lack of a sense of place in many of these arrangements that makes them difficult. While patterns of interaction and behavior may vary from project to project, the very nature of the 'collaboration' is often rooted in bringing together standardized professional communities in service of clients who are not part of these same discourses. The cultural and historical understandings of the community weigh little in comparison to the task of reconciling the norms for practice among the variety of professionals who serve these efforts.

We are reminded as well of John McKnight's lament in his essay 'John Deere and the Bereavement Counselor. ' When service professionals supplant those functions that were once part of the community's care for itself, he argues, their benefits must be 'weighed against the sum of socially distorting monetary costs to the commonwealth; the inverse effects of the interventions; the loss of knowledge, tools and skills, regarding other ways; and the antidemocratic consciousness created by a nation of clients.' (McKnight, 1996, p. 10). Neglecting the needs of specific communities and supplanting their ability to care for themselves in favor of a more universalistic, professionally driven relief efforts, in other words, carries a dear price. The challenge is to provide for the community in ways that the community can recognize as worthwhile and sustain as needed.
 

Over forty years after its publication, the effect of Conant's arguments on the generation of American educational policy and the influence of his work in developing a national agenda for American school are still impressive. Indeed, at the present time, contemporary educational policy at both the federal and state level emphasizes the promulgation of common standards for education; like Conant's plans, this national fix is also designed to affect schoolchildren all over the United States for the better. What is promised by the standards movement is a universal set of outcomes and benchmarks by which all children will be measured, if not a mechanism through which every American school can become 'world-class.'

Using the notion of a sense of place to frame our understanding of American schools points us in a different and perhaps conflicting direction. Place understandings emphasize the importance of constructing reforms that pay attention to detail, and have as their essence the assessment and understanding of the multicultural and fast-moving communities that characterize public schools today. In this view, universal outcomes mean little if we do not arrive at them through means that respect and nurture the particular strengths of the places and communities that house schools.

In this paper, I have argued that it is time to do exactly that--i.e., to reconsider place even in a climate that pushes us once again towards a uniform national agenda, if only to uncover whatever interesting alternatives and questions might emerge. No xenophobic or nostalgic impulse is at the heart of this enterprise. Rather, if we embrace as articles of faith the beliefs and findings of those who have studied and celebrated place, we can begin to envision how this deep and embedded local knowledge may unlock the 'triumphant promise' Wolfe imagined in both the city and the small town. Perhaps it is through this vision we can best prepare our students more fully for whatever locale they will encounter.
 
 

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