The Afterschool Movement: Looking into the Future

By Sam Piha

Sam Piha

As we welcome in the new year, we asked a number of afterschool leaders, "Looking into the future, what do you believe are the most important challenges and opportunities facing the afterschool movement?". Below are some of the responses we heard. 

We will include the responses of other leaders in a second blog post.

Jennifer Davis,
Co-Founder & President
The National Center
on Time & Learning

"The economic downturn continues to impact all youth programming in very negative ways and a more conservative Congress could mean cuts to federal programs that will further hurt children and communities.  On the other hand, more and more federal, state and city leaders now recognize the importance of closing BOTH the achievement and opportunity gaps and after-school, summer and expanded learning programs are key to that so new initiatives are being launched around the country to address these gaps. The recent after-school expansion by Mayor de Blasio in New York is just one example."  

Jennifer Peck,
Executive Director
Partnership for
 Children
and Youth

"Even though the context in schools is changing a great deal with the new standards and moving away from a test-focused accountability system, we still have a ways to go to ensure all afterschool and summer programs have the freedom and support from their school partners to provide strong, youth development-based programming that is complementary to classroom learning rather than replicating classroom learning. We now have new California Quality Standards for Expanded Learning Programs and a new accountability structure about to come into place (thanks to recently-approved Senate Bill 1221) that places greater emphasis on quality for all our state and federally funded afterschool and summer programs. 

Our biggest and most daunting challenge in my opinion is on the funding side. Our roughly 4,500 publicly funded expanded learning programs are still operating with $7.50 per child per day, a rate that was set in 2006 and with no cost-of-living increase policy in place. The cost of doing business has clearly risen since then, and on top of that, California has passed a minimum wage increase that will affect the staffing costs of many of our providers across the state. The field will have to get organized to raise awareness about this brewing crisis and assertively pursue solutions." 

Eric Gurna,
President and CEO
LA's BEST

"One overarching challenge is the idea that we can easily quantify either the outcomes or the process of our work. If we try too hard to prove our value towards incremental improvements in scores and grades that reflect a narrow definition of success, we diminish the real outcomes of our work, which are often long term and hard to see, but real nonetheless. If we try too hard to fit into a pseudo-scientific view of education and youth development which treats time as an ingredient in a formula, we forget that we can have an impact that is disproportionate to the amount of time kids spend with us. 


One big opportunity right now is the growing recognition that social, emotional and creative vitality should be a part of a real education. Afterschool has always valued these realms, and now has the opportunity to be the tail that wags the dog, showing other educational players how and why to create warm and engaging environments where young people have agency, make real choices, and are heard."

Karen Pittman,
Co-Founder, President, and CEO
Forum for Youth Investment

 "Broader definitions of readiness (beyond academic achievement) are now widely accepted.  Afterschool leaders are no longer alone in their calls for more attention to the development of social, emotional, and civic competencies.  Those who believe that the amount of learning time doesn’t matter are now in the significant majority.  The present, as a consequence, looks pretty rosy.   A rosy future, however, will take more planning and much more discipline.

The afterschool movement has been steadily supplementing value-add arguments focused primarily on 'when and where' with new arguments focused on 'what and how'.  We now have consensus on quality standards and improvement policies.  The future of the movement, from where I sit, hinges on our ability to articulate a practical theory of how young people gain the transferable skills we value and have practical common measures of both the practices that add up to 'quality' and the skills that add up to 'readiness'." (Note: Karen Pittman is working on a paper which will say more about how to do this. We will provide information on how to access this paper in an upcoming blog post - Sam Piha).

"If afterschool and summer programs are to be successful in the long-run, they

need to be known as important places of learning. This means that we need to be more intentional in communicating the learning goals of our activities and having a way to acknowledge the learning by adult staff and youth participants. We believe that the use of digital badges provides a method of acknowledging learning where it happens. 

Sam Piha, Founder and Co-Director
Temescal Associates and
The LIAS Project

It is also important that we think about 'how children learn', not just what children need to learn. This will guide the development of our learning approaches and activities in afterschool and summer programs. We believe that the Learning in Afterschool & Summer learning principles serves to provide a framework for us to think more about 'how children learn'. 

Lastly, we have new evidence and research telling us how important it is that we promote character development, social and emotional skills, and positive growth mindsets. These things are vital to a child's education and later success. They also fall into the sweet spot of afterschool and summer programs but it requires that we are intentional about promoting these things."

Jodi Grant,
Executive Director
Afterschool Alliance

"The most important challenge facing the afterschool field is increasing the availability of quality afterschool programs for children and families.  We know that for every one child currently in a program, there are 2 more children whose parents say they would enroll their children if more programs were available. Research shows that quality afterschool programs keep kids safe, inspire learning and helping working parents keep working and be more productive while at work. Every child and family that wants an afterschool program should have access to a quality program that meets their needs.  We have a long way to go, but we have made significant progress over the last ten years.  With an afterschool field that is much stronger now than ever before and with strong parent support for public funding for afterschool, I am confident that progress will continue."

Expanded Learning Requires Expanded Thinking: An Interview with Karen Pittman, Part 2

By Sam Piha 

We have been following the national discussion of "expanded learning". We believe that expanded learning opportunities should be developed by both educators and out-of-school time leaders. Further, we believe that any discussion of expanded learning time has to include clear learning principles that explain how children best learn so we can shape these experiences accordingly. The Learning in Afterschool & Summer project is focused on defining these learning principles.

Karen Pittman

Below is an interview on this topic with Karen Pittman, President and CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment. This interview with the FrameWorks Institute is an excerpt of one that the Forum posted on their website, which can be found here in its entirety. We offer this interview in 2 parts. 

Q: What does a classroom that promotes intrinsic motivation look like? 

A: In an engaging classroom you will see desks pushed together, more team time, students working on group projects where the project on one table may be completely different from the project on the next table. Essentially, this is about effective project-based learning. Young people need opportunities to make meaningful decisions about topics they want to learn about, and then [they need] the supports to do something with that topic.  

Once you show students that they can really learn whatever they want to learn and they experience that sense of mastery, they will learn because they enjoy feeling that sense of mastery. In that kind of environment, young people will trust an adult who says, “You need to learn this because …”  

Q: There seems to be a notion in the education system that fairness is about having clearly defined standards and everyone learning the same thing. Do you see that as a problem?  

A: Standards are good. We use standards in our work for all kinds of things. There is value, however, in broadening what gets included in standards, and providing genuine opportunities for students to get there through different paths. So we need youth to have basic reading and math skills, but we also need them to develop teamwork, communication and problem-solving skills, financial literacy, a solid work ethic. These are competencies that have multiple uses once you develop them and that employers say their incoming workforce often lacks.  

There are examples of schools paying close attention to both content and competence. In the New Tech Network’s high schools, half of a student’s course grade is based on mastery of the content, and the other half is for improvement in different skills like teamwork, communication and initiative. Teachers’ lesson plans address both content and the development of those core competencies.   

Q: What do you think about the separation between the learning that goes on inside vs. outside of school?  

A: When kids are in preschool, we stay true to an expanded definition of learning. Learning in the early years includes all of those things that allow kids to be curious and navigate their environment, and teachers and parents are considered equal partners in learning. When kids become school-aged, the definition gets restrictive. The word “learning” gets captured by school – and then suddenly everything else isn’t thought of as learning. 

When an uncle teaches his nephew how to tune an engine, does that get counted as learning? Maybe. Does it get the same respect as the learning that occurs when a teacher teaches you how to do long division? No. And yet when we do a simple exercise and ask people to reflect on the most powerful learning experiences they had as a young person, their answers are rarely about something they learned in school.  

Q: What kinds of changes do you think need to happen in order to improve the quality of our education system?   

A: Public education is absolutely critical to the American ideal, but there is room for reinvention. Look at other large public systems, like public health. The CDC [Centers for Disease Control] has reinvented itself many times, both in terms of how public health is defined and how the system is designed to address it. We haven’t done the same level of redefinition and reinvention in public education. The system is defined more by buildings and schedules than by student learning needs and desires. 

I would want to step back and think about what really works for kids and families. Research on everything from how kids learn to adolescent sleep patterns demonstrates that the system as currently conceived isn’t working for many kids. But we have difficulty getting outside of the box. I’d like to get to a public education system that has standards, expectations and resources, but a little more flexibility in terms of how and where learning happens. We have the expertise and the technology to make public education a very different system while keeping its core intact.  

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Karen Pittman is a co-founder, President and CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment. She started her career at the Urban Institute, conducting numerous studies on social services for children and families. Karen later moved to the Children’s Defense Fund, launching its adolescent pregnancy prevention initiatives and helping to create its adolescent policy agenda. In 1990 she became a vice president at the Academy for Educational Development, where she founded and directed the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research and its spin-off, the National Training Institute for Community Youth Work.

In 1995 Karen joined the Clinton administration as director of the President's Crime Prevention Council, where she worked with 13 cabinet secretaries to create a coordinated prevention agenda. From there she moved to the executive team of the International Youth Foundation (IYF), charged with helping the organization strengthen its program content and develop an evaluation strategy. In 1998 she and Rick Little, head of the foundation, took a leave of absence to work with ret. Gen. Colin Powell to create America’s Promise. Upon her return, she and Irby launched the Forum, which later became an entity separate from IYF.

Expanded Learning Requires Expanded Thinking: An Interview with Karen Pittman, Part 1

By Sam Piha 

We have been following the national discussion of "expanded learning". We believe that expanded learning opportunities should be developed by both educators and out-of-school time leaders. Further, we believe that any discussion of expanded learning time has to include clear learning principles that explain how children best learn so we can shape these experiences accordingly. The Learning in Afterschool & Summer project is focused on defining these learning principles.

Karen Pittman

Below is an interview on this topic with Karen Pittman, President and CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment.  This interview with the FrameWorks Institute is an excerpt of one that the Forum posted on their website, which can be found here in its entirety. We offer this interview in 2 parts. 

Q: In education circles there is a lot of talk about what kids learn and how learning happens. Is the expanded learning agenda getting the where and when questions on the table?  

A: We haven’t asked the how and why questions about learning enough. So the when and where questions either don’t come up or they don’t stick. The conversation about extended learning is still very school-centric and bound within a fairly restrictive definition of how learning happens and why.  

Learning is an intrinsic thing that humans do. If kids are awake – whether they are two or 12 – they’re learning and developing. Learning is intrinsically satisfying. But that can get lost when it is defined only in terms of academic content. When learning becomes too defined by content, the conversation about expanding when and where kids learn becomes a conversation about where to stick the content, and the intrinsic side can get lost.  

School only fills a small piece of that developmental space, but we spend very little time trying to understand, assess, improve and coordinate the learning that’s going on in the rest of that space. As long as our definition of learning is driven by formal education and things like the common core and standardized tests, we’re unlikely to capitalize on the opportunity presented by the rest of that time and space.  

  

Q: What are the first steps to de-compartmentalizing learning?  

A: One way is to put the learning that happens through high-quality programs and opportunities outside of school on par with K-12 learning. Another way is to bring [into schools] more of what these other practitioners have figured out about effective learning opportunities.  

Reed Larson’s research on intrinsic motivation is relevant here. In one study, middle school kids were given beepers so the research team could track what they were doing and how they were feeling. Each time he [Larson] beeped them, they responded to a couple of quick questions about what they were doing and their levels of concentration and motivation. When kids were in class, they weren’t motivated and they weren’t concentrating. When they were with friends, they were motivated but not concentrating. When they were playing sports, they reported relatively high levels of both motivation and concentration. The highest levels of concentration and motivation were reported when youth were in structured informal learning environments where they had made choices about what they were doing and how to do it.  

This doesn’t mean we shut down schools and send everyone to youth programs, but it should make us think about how to bring higher levels of intrinsic motivation and engagement into schools. Schools are not monolithic. Some students certainly experience more engaging, motivating experiences than others. If you beeped kids who were in a magnet science program, they would probably be engaged. They would likely be in a different type of learning environment than kids in, say, a remedial English course. The most gifted and talented kids get more opportunities for this kind of engagement. Far too many others experience the other end of the spectrum.  

I would flip the conversation about learning. The underlying assumption is that the stuff we want kids to learn is like medicine. If left to their own devices, they wouldn’t learn it.  We need to spend more time understanding how we can support intrinsic motivation.   

___________________________________

Karen Pittman is a co-founder, President and CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment. She started her career at the Urban Institute, conducting numerous studies on social services for children and families. Karen later moved to the Children’s Defense Fund, launching its adolescent pregnancy prevention initiatives and helping to create its adolescent policy agenda. In 1990 she became a vice president at the Academy for Educational Development, where she founded and directed the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research and its spin-off, the National Training Institute for Community Youth Work.

In 1995 Karen joined the Clinton administration as director of the President's Crime Prevention Council, where she worked with 13 cabinet secretaries to create a coordinated prevention agenda. From there she moved to the executive team of the International Youth Foundation (IYF), charged with helping the organization strengthen its program content and develop an evaluation strategy. In 1998 she and Rick Little, head of the foundation, took a leave of absence to work with ret. Gen. Colin Powell to create America’s Promise. Upon her return, she and Irby launched the Forum, which later became an entity separate from IYF.

Extended Learning Time and More: An Interview with Karen Pittman, Part 1

, 

Karen Pittman

By Sam Piha


Karen Pittman is President and CEO of Forum for Youth Investment and is known nationally as the leading advocate for youth development. Many credit her with launching the youth development movement and being an important thought leader promoting policies and systemic approaches to supporting young people's development, including the Ready By 21 initiative. See her full bio below. 

Q: You have recently cautioned us to think more clearly about diverting funds and efforts to expand learning time by expanding the school day.  Can you briefly summarize your concerns?

A: Ensuring that all young people are ready for college, work and life requires integrated communitywide commitments to learning. While the current push to expand learning time offers some great opportunities, it could actually have the opposite effect of decreasing overall learning time in communities. This is because if public funding currently available to community-based organizations through programs like the 21st Century Community Learning Centers is redirected toward schools, some CBOs will have to reduce their programming or even shut down.  


Also, a shift toward schools alone being held accountable for expanded learning time could destabilize effective collaborations that are finally in place, actively supporting effective community-school partnerships. But the most important thing to remember is simply that more time doesn’t necessarily equal more learning. Learning opportunities must be high quality if they are going to produce more learning – whether they happen in classrooms or CBOs. 

Q: The Learning in Afterschool Project is stressing the need to increase learning engagement in OST programs by promoting 5 learning principles that should characterize how we design activities in afterschool programs.  These principles are: learning that is active, collaborative, meaningful, supports mastery and expands horizons. Can you comment on which of these you think are most important?

A: They are all critical. Your principles reflect what our own field experience and research suggest about the characteristics of effective learning environments. They speak to both staff practices and program content, which is important. I think that working toward mastery, which goes right to the intersection of program content and staff practices – is something we need to be more intentional about in out-of-school time (OST) settings. Ensuring that young people have opportunities to engage in activities that build their skills and interests over time can be difficult in settings where participation and staffing patterns aren’t always as consistent as school.


Q: Do you have any advice of how best to get these principles better integrated in our expectations of afterschool programs?

A: In our experience generating data that give staff concrete feedback about the extent to which they are implementing these principles and the kinds of practices that support them is extremely  powerful. We know that professional development as usual – sending staff off to a training here and a training there – does not change organizational practice in sustained ways.  The Forum’s Center for Youth Program Quality is working with over 60 networks of OST programs around the country to build their capacity to do this kind of continuous quality improvement work. This kind of data-driven continuous quality improvement approach is the direction that education and other human services fields are moving as well.

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Karen Pittman is a co-founder, President and CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment. She started her career at the Urban Institute, conducting numerous studies on social services for children and families. Karen later moved to the Children’s Defense Fund, launching its adolescent pregnancy prevention initiatives and helping to create its adolescent policy agenda. In 1990 she became a vice president at the Academy for Educational Development, where she founded and directed the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research and its spin-off, the National Training Institute for Community Youth Work.

In 1995 Karen joined the Clinton administration as director of the President's Crime Prevention Council, where she worked with 13 cabinet secretaries to create a coordinated prevention agenda. From there she moved to the executive team of the International Youth Foundation (IYF), charged with helping the organization strengthen its program content and develop an evaluation strategy. In 1998 she and Rick Little, head of the foundation, took a leave of absence to work with ret. Gen. Colin Powell to create America’s Promise. Upon her return, she and Irby launched the Forum, which later became an entity separate from IYF.

More Learning Time Is Good If It's Truly Quality Learning Time

By Sam Piha

Even though it seems like it took forever, there is a growing consensus that out-of-school learning is a vital component in improving young people’s academic outcomes. This is in part due to the growing body of research on out-of-school learning, which includes summer learning and STEM learning in informal settings, as well as the findings of school reform efforts that show schools can’t do it alone.

This is reflected in the growing interest in community schools (see OUSD’s strategic plan to incorporate the community schools model) expanded learning (led by TASC, Citizen Schools and The National Center on Time & Learning,) and year-round learning (see HRFP's brief on year-round learning.) It is important that afterschool professionals understand and participate in the discussions of these concepts.

While the issues of increased access and structural supports are important, we believe that the discussion of the approaches that promote quality learning is still absent. The Learning in Afterschool Project is working to focus the field on how children learn and what the most effective approaches are.

Policy Recommendations for ESEA Reauthorization

By Guest Bloggers, Jessica Donner, Director, Collaborative for Building After-School Systems , and Jennifer Peck, Executive Director, Partnership for Children and Youth.

As you know, the federal reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will influence the funding of the 21st Century Learning Centers (21st CCLC). The Partnership for Children and Youth and the Collaborative for Building After School Systems (CBASS) recently finalized ESEA policy recommendations and shared ideas to strengthen the 21st CCLC program with lead staffers from HELP (U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions) and appropriations committees in late March. Some of the key themes in our recommendations include:

• Ensuring that local communities can choose from a variety of quality options that meet their needs for expanding learning opportunities
• Ensuring all 21st CCLC funded programs are joint endeavors between schools and community partners 
• Providing distinct and appropriate guidance for high-school level programs, recognizing the unique challenges and opportunities for this age group 
• Structuring an accountability system that is clear and appropriate, based on research about what expanded learning opportunities can effectively impact, and include multiple measures
• Recognizing and promoting the critical role of intermediaries in the success of programs and systems

In partnership with the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF), CBASS and The After-School Corporation (TASC) co-sponsored a Congressional study tour of TASC expanded learning time schools in May, thanks to generous support from the Mott Foundation. During the two-day visit, two dozen Washington-based Congressional staff members and U.S. Department of Education policy leaders focused on the school-community model for expanding the time and ways students learn. We continued the discussion on June 27th, at an AYPF forum on effective school-community partnerships in Washington DC with more than 50 congressional staffers.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated as more activity unfolds. Likewise, we’d love to hear from you, and very much would like to hear your reaction to our policy recommendations. In addition, if your organization has developed your own recommendations, please send them along to jdonner@tascorp.org so we can help promote shared priorities.
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Jessica Donner serves as the Director of the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems (CBASS), a partnership of after-school intermediary organizations in eight cities dedicated to increasing the availability of quality afterschool programming.

Jennifer Peck was a founding staff member of the Partnership For Children and Youth in 2001 and became its Executive Director in 2003. Jennifer leads a coalition of California organizations advocating for new federal policies to improve the effectiveness of after-school and summer-learning programs.