In the future, elementary and secondary schools must regard their role as including tasks beyond educating individual students. Schools will have to provide certain functions which were traditionally provided by the home and the community. Based on this premise, there are implications for the functioning of schools and for the kinds of data needed to evaluate school effectiveness and to guide school policy. When a society changes outside the school, it is necessary for the schools to change, also. School success has traditionally been associated with strong families and strong communities. Changing social situations have lessened the community's ability to provide support for the schools; therefore, schools must modify their activities. Schools can either strengthen and rebuild the supporting social structures, by increasing parental involvement and strengthening community structure, or they can provide school activities which build compensatory social structures. Implications for data collection by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) involve measuring social structure and its relation to school; measuring school policies relevant to social structure; and using NCES data to augment parental resources. (A few comments on the National Longitudinal Study of High School Seniors and the High School and Beyond Study are included). (GDC)