Afterschool for Older Youth and More: An Interview with Karen Pittman, Part 2

By Sam Piha

Karen Pittman

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: In California, all the dollars supporting afterschool learning opportunities for high school youth come from federal 21st CCLC funds (most of the funding for elementary and middle school programs   come from protected state funds); how important do you think it is that we include high school age youth in the afterschool equation?

A: It’s critically important that teenagers, and especially our most vulnerable youth, have access to supports and opportunities geared toward helping them build skills, connect with positive adults, and navigate the transition to adulthood. This is especially important given how many young people are not on track to graduate and how many more are not on track to graduate college and career-ready. California’s funneling all of its 21st CCLC dollars to high school programming has been a boost for the field as you all have had a chance to innovate programmatically and experiment with things like credit recovery.


Q: What do you see as the major risks and opportunities facing the out-of-school time (OST) movement?

A: I think the conversation that is unfolding about expanded learning opportunities represents a real opportunity for the field. The education community is acknowledging schools alone cannot ensure all young people are ready for college, work and life. The business community is acknowledging that young people need more opportunities to develop 21st century skills. Communities are building infrastructure to support broad goals, meaningful partnerships, and shared data. Now is the time for OST programs to shore up their commitment to quality and to put a stake in the ground about the kinds of outcomes they want to be held accountable for. If test scores and grades are not necessarily the best things to measure success by – what is? The development of communication, collaboration, and critical thinking skills? Creativity? Hope? We need to do a better job of naming and measuring outcomes we know are critical to youth success and that programs can influence.   

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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.

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

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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.

Ongoing Debate On Using 21st CCLC Funds for Extending the School Day

By Sam Piha


On this blog we have been following the discussions nationwide about whether or not to allow 21st CCLC funds for afterschool to be diverted to extending the school day. We have interviewed several advocates, including Jennifer Davis and Carla Sanger, about this topic. 


Recently, the Washington Post posted a blog that featured differing views authored by Jennifer Davis, co-founder and president of the National Center on Time & Learning, and Jodi Grant, executive director of the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance. To read their comments and the comments of many readers, click here. 

Adding Arts to STEM: Making STEAM

By Sam Piha

Thinking about how to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in afterschool is a topic that has everybody talking; this includes activities during the school year and in the summer. A recent article in Education Week focused on efforts to gauge girls in STEM activities, and featured Techbridge, a Bay Area program.

The Afterschool Alliance recently published a paper offering an analysis of the impact and outcomes of attending a high-quality afterschool program that emphasizes STEM activities. They found that “attending high-quality STEM afterschool programs yields STEM-specific benefits that can be organized under three broad categories: improved attitudes toward STEM fields and careers; increased STEM knowledge and skills; and higher likelihood of graduation and pursuing a STEM career.”

Now many STEM advocates are making the case that adding the disciplines of art and design to STEM activities (STEAM) greatly enhances the learning experience. A recent EdWeek article explored the idea of merging the arts with STEM to further unlock students’ creativity and innovation.

The National Science Foundation has underwritten a number of conferences on this subject, including hosting a forum at Rhode Island School of Design titled, “Bridging STEM to STEAM: Developing New Frameworks for Art-Science-Design Pedagogy.”

What do you think? Should the arts be integrated into afterschool STEM activities?

Addressing the Afterschool Needs of Youth in Rural Settings

By Sam Piha

There has been a growing interest in the needs of rural youth and how we can better serve their needs through afterschool programs. We want to call your attention to a number of new resources that can serve to support this work:

• Temescal recently published a paper, I Feel Like I’m Somebody: Older Youth and High School Afterschool Programs in a Rural California Town. This paper was authored by Logan Robertson, who has conducted research on such programs and managed an afterschool program for older, rural youth.  

• A new blog titled “Rural Education”offers new important information on the needs of rural youth. The latest blog informs us of recent research that reveals that rural youth have a greater incidence of substance abuse and a lower rate of college enrollment. 

• The California Afterschool Network website offers a number of articles and relevant events that promote the importance of quality afterschool programs in rural settings.

New California After School Division Chief

By Sam Piha

Michael Funk

On December 15, 2011, Tom Torlakson, State Superintendent of Schools, announced that Michael Funk will head the new After School Division within the California Department of Education (which until the recent CDE realignment had been a unit of another division).

Michael Funk served as the founder and Executive Director for the Sunset Neighborhood Beacon Center since 1996 and has served on the California Advisory Committee on Before and After School since its inception. He has also been the co-director for the Learning in Afterschool Project (LIA).

Michael has been a strong advocate for quality afterschool programs that reflect the learning principles of the LIA Project – learning that is active, collaborative, meaningful to the participants, promotes mastery, and expands horizons. We congratulate Michael on this appointment and look forward to his leadership of the California Afterschool movement. 

Expanding Horizons and Global Learning

By Sam Piha

On January 27, 2012, the Learning in Afterschool Project will sponsor a one-day conference entitled How Kids Learn.  One of our featured speakers will be Alexis Menten from the Asia Society.

Alexis Menten, Asia Society

Learning that expands young people's horizons is one of the five key learning principles of the Learning in Afterschool Project. This includes the promotion of global learning and understanding. You can read Alexis’ views on expanding horizons, lengthening the school day, and global competencies by viewing her post on the Global Learning blog. The Asia Society also offers a resource website to guide afterschool programs in promoting global learning entitled Expanding Horizons. 

To learn more about an award-winning youth program that is focused on developing young people’s global competencies and view some of their resources, check out Global Kids. 

A new publication entitled Virtual Vacation: A Leader's Guide offers an integrated approach to promoting global awareness. It will be available from Temescal Associates very shortly. This approach was developed by the NHP Foundation and implemented in afterschool programs near New Orleans.  

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Alexis Menten is a Director in Asia Society’s Education division, where she leads afterschool and youth leadership initiatives for the Partnership for Global Learning. The Partnership connects educators, business leaders, and policymakers to share best practices, build partnerships, and advance policies to ensure that all students are prepared for work and citizenship in the global 21st century. In support of this mission, Alexis directs Asia Society’s Expanding Horizons initiative, which provides technical assistance, professional development trainings, and resource publications that advance global learning as an essential approach for all high-quality afterschool and summer programs, and as a means to build collaboration between schools and community partners. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College.

Why Collaborative Learning?

 By Sam Piha

The Learning in Afterschool Project promotes collaborative learning as one of its five learning principles of quality afterschool programs.

Why do we emphasize collaboration? YouthLearn offers some important reasons why collaborative learning is important:

“The New Economy is distinguished by interlocking partnerships and networks of people and organizations. In the past a loner may have been at a disadvantage, but today, he or she may not be able to survive. Businesses work in teams; they outsource, form alliances and hire without ever running an advertisement. Put simply, the opportunities available to your kids will be as much dependent on their mastery of communication and collaboration skills as on writing or math skills.

People care about things they feel a part of and about which they feel at least some degree of ownership. If your kids are involved in planning and decision making, they'll show a level of enthusiasm and curiosity that schools can only dream of.

More knowledge, creativity and ideas can be found in two minds than in one, and even more can be found in four or in 10. When kids see what their friends have done with a project, they add to it and create something even more original. In out-of-school programs, you have the freedom to let kids work in groups almost all the time and to shift the groups around so that kids learn from lots of different people.

Face it, there's no way you can know about everything, especially once new technologies like the Internet, computers, software, scanners, cameras and all the other devices are added into the mix. Then again, why should you have to? Don't be afraid to let kids teach each other when one of them becomes an expert in PhotoShop and another an online audio wizard—that's the real power of collaboration. Rather than being mired in the details of ever-changing software programs, you can focus on the important jobs of coach, guide and educator.”

The Global Development Research Center offers a number of useful tools for those interested in exploring collaborative learning, with specific techniques and methods. We recommend that you visit this site and other sites that will appear when you do an internet search for "collaborative learning".

CBASS Helps Influence 21st CCLC Legislative Changes

Jessica Donner

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

With the draft ESEA bill introduced last week by the Senate HELP committee, federal activity has been heating up. On October 20th, thanks to a critical push by Senator Whitehouse (RI), The Collaborative for Building After-School Systems (CBASS) helped influence a few big wins in the legislation.

Jennifer Peck

Thanks to Hillary Salmons of Providence After School Alliance (PASA), CBASS worked closely with Senator Whitehouse’s office to introduce an amendment that reflects his priorities and builds off the bipartisan base bill to ensure the program supports high quality programs that include community partners and local choice. Policies we support in 21st Century ESEA reauthorization are included in our letter to Chairman Tom Harkin and Ranking Member Mike Enzi, Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The legislative changes instituted today are an important first step forward to maintaining support for after-school and summer learning as anchor approaches in the program and ensuring community partners play a lead role in delivering programs, in collaboration with schools.

Here are the wins:
1. No federal preference or priority on which approach (after-school, summer, expanded learning for some kids, expanded learning for all kids) will be used.

2. Support for community partners. Amendment strengthens community partner requirement, with only a narrow exception for particular rural communities for whom the requirement would be a significant hardship.

3. Clarity on who can be fiscal agent. Whitehouse amendment ensures that either the district or nonprofit partner can be the lead fiscal agent.

4. Support for quality programs as well as innovation. New language ensures that effective and innovative approaches to programs can be utilized by grantees.

There are other big pieces we would like to see moving forward, including clarifying the definition of ELT to make sure it’s inclusive of enrichment activities, community partners and is focused on ELT design, not whole school redesign. We look forward to working with you to help improve the legislation even further.

Please join us in thanking Senator Whitehouse for his leadership and commitment to an improved 21st CCLC program!

To follow future developments effecting education and afterschool at the federal and state level, go to: http://www.learninginafterschool.org/developmentsinas.htm

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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. She will also be one of our speakers at the upcoming How Kids Learn Conference in January 2012.

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.

Honest Conversations about Youth Development and Education

Eric Gurna

By Sam Piha

Eric Gurna and his organization, Development Without Limits, is now offering Please Speak Freely, podcasts of interviews with afterschool and educational thought leaders. To date, podcast interviews have included Karen Pittman, Pedro Noguera, Alexis Menten, and Earl Martin Phalen. To learn more about Please Speak Freely podcast, click here.

Pedro Noguera

Just a note, Pedro Noguera and Alexis Menten are just two of an all-star group of speakers who will present at the Learning in Afterschool’s one-day conference entitled How Kids Learn. For more details, click here.

Race to Nowhere

By Sam Piha

How best to educate our kids continues to be a topic of discussion, which has recently been spurred on by the release of feature length documentaries. Race to Nowhere is the latest release on the subject.

From the film's website: “Race to Nowhere points to the silent epidemic in our schools: cheating has become commonplace, students have become disengaged, stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant, and young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.

Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens.

In a grassroots sensation already feeding a groundswell for change, hundreds of theaters, schools and organizations nationwide are hosting community screenings during a six month campaign to screen the film nationwide. Tens of thousands of people are coming together, using the film as the centerpiece for raising awareness, radically changing the national dialogue on education and galvanizing change.”

We do not have an opinion on this film as we have not had a chance to view it. But that chance is coming soon. To learn more about this film and learn where it is being screened, click here. To view the trailer, click here. For those who have a chance to view this documentary, we welcome your comments.