This study explores broad alternative policies on urban school facilities and education rather than attempting to design the "best" policy. The study also provides a broad perspective within which to place school construction decisions by analyzing goals, stakeholders' positions, and implementation actions. The main portion of the study highlights how the possible choice between two "construction" alternatives (educational parks and mini-schools) is influenced by other crucial urban education policy issues, and the effects of the latter upon the alternatives. In the context of the current situation where major city school systems are in precarious relationship with their environment (parents, civil rights groups, black militants, teachers' unions, and students), questions of financing, construction, and location of new schools are considered to be interwoven with educational issues (transactional patterns, evidence on probable effects of specific programs, school integration as affecting transactional patterns, and community control), and are analyzed as such in the study. The study concludes that neither of the two facility innovations examined--educational parks and mini-schools--offer much promise to education, and that, despite the skepticism developed in the study relating to community control, the latter would be the choice among the potential driving forces for change to combine with new construction. (RJ)