How this Chicago After-School Program Helped Shift the Arc of Kids’ Lives

By Sam Piha

We promote social emotional learning, character building, and participation in afterschool programs by promising that these things will help young people succeed in “school, work and life”. We are all familiar with research and evaluation that confirm that these things increase academic outcomes in both the short term and down the line.

We now have a study looking at how participation in an afterschool program changed the arc of young people’s lives. According to Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post,“ ‘You Can’t Be What You Can’t See’ is a new book by Milbrey W. McLaughlin that looks at the long-term effects of an after-school academic program in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project, a violence-wracked complex that was located on the Near North Side of Chicago and was once home to some 15,000 people.”   

David L. Kirp

We interviewed Milbrey McLaughlin in a recent LIAS blog post published on June 19, 2018. We now invite you to read a review of her book and commentary entitled How this Chicago after-school program helped shift the arc of kids’ lives — for the long term. This is written by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post and David L. Kirp from the Graduate School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.