Policies and Practices
for Addressing Barriers to Student Learning:
Current Status and New Directions

Over the summer and fall of 1996, we held a series of three regional meetings focused on the topic "Policies and Practices for Addressing Barriers to Student Learning: Current Status and New Directions". The meetings brought together dedicated leaders from 25 states and the District of Columbia. They represented a mixture of national, state, and local agencies and organizations.

We're interested in your views about policy needs in this area and your ideas about how to move a policy agenda forward. After reading our analysis, let us know what you think.

The following is an Executive Summary from our Center's document entitled:

There is growing concern among policy makers and many practitioners about serious flaws in current policies designed to address barriers to learning and promote healthy development. Although aimed at preventing and correcting learning, behavior, emotional and health problems, these policies squander limited resources and impede good practice. Reflecting on these concerns, leaders from state and local agencies and organizations gathered at regional meetings in the fall and summer of 1996 in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Portland, Maine to share their perspectives on what's happening currently, what's getting in the way of necessary systemic changes, and what might help quicken the pace of reform.

Some current initiatives aim to stimulate increased collaboration within schools, among schools, between schools and community agencies, and among agencies at local, state, and federal levels. Such initiatives mean to enhance cooperation and eventually increase integrated use of resources. The hope is that cooperation and integration will lead to better use of limited resources; another implicit hope is that collaboration will lead to comprehensive services. There is, however, no explicit policy framework for a comprehensive, integrated approach to address barriers to learning and promote healthy development. To underscore this point, it was stressed that in policy and practice:

• little attention is paid to restructuring the education support programs and services that schools own and operate
  
• little attention is paid to doing more than co-locating a few community health and human services at select school sites
  
• little attention is paid to weaving school owned resources and community owned resources together into a comprehensive, integrated approach to address barriers to learning and enhance healthy development.
  

Thus, in both policy and practice, it is evident that developing a comprehensive, integrated approach continues to be a low priority.

What's getting in the way of elevating the level of priority policy makers place on developing comprehensive approaches for addressing barriers to learning? Widely recognized are factors such as limited understanding and public support, battles among competing stakeholder groups for narrowly-defined vested interests, the lack of a unifying concept around which to rally support and guide policy formulation, the problem of balancing centralized and decentralized governance, rule-driven accountability, inadequate professional training, a dearth of evidence on intervention efficacy, and failure of many agencies to take advantage of shifts in policy.

Given this litany of impediments, how can we move forward more quickly to develop a policy framework for a comprehensive, integrated approach? Participants agreed that the most fundamental need is to elevate the level of priority policy makers assign to addressing barriers to learning. Central to influencing policy priorities is a compelling campaign of education and advocacy. Such a campaign would benefit from being organized around a unifying vision of a comprehensive, integrated approach for addressing barriers to learning and enhancing healthy development.

Planning and implementing any campaign requires development of leadership and infrastructure. The regional meetings brought together stakeholders who could take a leadership role in evolving policy to address barriers to learning. As a next step, our Center proposes to provide technical assistance for organizing an infrastructure consisting of a steering committee and work groups at local, state, regional, and national levels. These groups will focus on creating and implementing multifaceted and multiyear strategies to enhance widespread understanding and build constituencies to encourage policy makers to treat the matter of addressing barriers to learning as a primary concern.

Specifically, the campaign will emphasize the need to develop a unifying policy framework for a comprehensive, integrated approach to address barriers to learning and promote healthy development. Once the initial campaign is well underway, steering and work groups will have to pursue ongoing advocacy to ensure development of:

• policies and strategies for implementing prototype demonstrations that weave together school and community resources in ways that create a comprehensive, integrated approach
  
• formative evaluations that lead to a summative focus on efficacy only after the prototype or any new site is functioning as planned
  

Finally, the steering and work groups will need to advocate for scale-up -- policies and strategies to ensure that comprehensive, integrated approaches are developed and maintained on a large-scale.

As one form of support for all this activity, the Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA will provide a range of technical assistance such as:

• generating examples of the type of general policy statements that are needed,
  
• developing strategic guidelines for how to encourage endorsement by policy makers,
  
• helping to minimize the negative effects of competition among the many stakeholder groups concerned with specific facets of addressing barriers to learning,
  
• sharing models for use in developing prototype demonstrations and for use in the diffusion process, and
  
• aiding with evaluation planning.