Finding a New Fit for the Family.

Our schools need new ways to think about and foster parental and community involvement in education.

For more than 25 years, we have groused about weakening support for the schools at the grassroots level. Mostly, though, we have been busy with other policy agenda, be they equal educational opportunity or the pursuit of excellence through standards and accountability. Or, most often, we simply try to hold existing programs together in a perilous environment.

Dwindling participation in PTAs, growing difficulties gaining approval for bond issues and tax levies, incessant demands that schools shoulder more responsibility for children's welfare, chronic tensions with parents or community organizations--those were just further obstacles to be surmounted, unfortunate circumstances deriving from demographic, societal, and economic factors beyond our control.

To be sure, some schools and communities have dealt successfully with these strains through innovative arrangements for school-family collaboration and various configurations of school-based community services. But, at bottom, little fundamental change has occurred in educators' thinking about the roles of school, family, and community.

We hold fast, and not without good reason, to schools' and teachers' hard-won autonomy. We see only supporting roles for parents and communities in the education of children--expanded roles, perhaps, but supporting all the same. We are ambivalent about taking on more community responsibilities, especially when societal problems are growing, and community organizations--churches, youth organizations, settlement houses and so forth--are in even more difficulty than schools.

Most of all, we yearn for the good old days of the 1950s and '60s, when newly educated and affluent parents in burgeoning communities presented us with both the baby boom and unparalleled financial support.

We must put that nostalgic vision behind us. Like most "good old days," it was not as great as our memory suggests--ask poor or minority folks how they remember it. And it will never happen again; too much sweeping change has occurred in families, schools, and communities to even imagine it.

We must develop a new perspective and it must rest on three challenging propositions:

* schools cannot succeed nowadays (or, to put it more strongly, schools will fail) without the collaboration of parents and communities;

* families need unprecedentedly strong support to become and remain functional; and

* communities must take charge of all of the developmental needs of their children.

It will be difficult and painful to assent fully to these propositions. Building up families and communities will ultimately strengthen education, to be sure, but the process may be tumultuous to the extent that it will involve parents and community leaders claiming prerogatives and assuming new roles in realms of school activity that educators now solely exercise.

It will mean, for example le, collaborative curricular and pedagogical decisions affecting both schools and individual students. It may mean giving up ownership of facilities or at least sharing them more widely. It also may mean more limited autonomy for school districts and boards. It will involve discarding our long-held stereotypical views of how families function, and learning how to take today's families on their own, rather than the school's terms.

It will require great conviction, trust, and leadership to make such manifold commitments. The only thing worse than doing it may be not doing it and watching these three institutions continue to erode.

This challenge must call forth bravery, above all. School leadership must be at the head of this parade! No one else can speak with as much legitimacy and effect in every community in the land. Few others can, frankly, stand the heat; attitudes and behaviors of long standing will not change overnight; a new sense of trust and common purpose will not bloom immediately.

But the outcome will be more than worth it--a community crusade for children with schools that are redesigned and reinvigorated.

Michael Timpane, retired recently as president of Teachers College, Columbia University.