What is needed to help children succeed at high levels is already known, and that vision and commitment are essential to bring about reform efforts that research has already established as effective. Conditions that contribute to academic success and well being include nurturing and supportive families, economically and socially healthy neighborhoods, and effective public service systems. Although researchers have developed an understanding of the practices that produce these conditions, the country is currently doing very little to finance them. Even though it is widely recognized that services must be more community-based, flexible, family focused, asset-based, and comprehensive, most services are in fact fragmented, categorical, reactive, deficit-oriented, and remote from the real needs they should meet. It will take substantial public sector investments or redeployments of funding to create the needed new services and opportunities. It will take new vision at the national level as well as at state and local levels to secure these needed investments. (Contains four tables.) (SLD)