After School Programs Relevance / Impact

An activity guide that links academic content standards to the real world through gardens, nutrition, cooking, recycling, and the environment. Activities engage teachers and students in grades two through seven in exploring fresh, seasonal, locally grown produce through direct experience. Using tested recipes and farm profiles, Kids Cook Farm-Fresh Food links agriculture and the culinary arts to reading, mathematics, social sciences, and geography. This activity guide is available for free download. For more information, click here.

This Guidebook, released in March 2010 from the League of California Afterschool Providers, offers promising practices in developing and maintaining quality partnerships between local education agencies (LEAs) and community-based organizations (CBOs). The guidebook is based on 14 existing California partnerships in three categories, including LEA/CBO partnerships to serve diverse urban communities, partnerships to serve rural communities, and inter-governmental partnerships. For more information, and to access this guidebook, click here.

Two new Child Trends briefs draw on research across the fields of college readiness, workplace readiness, and youth development to identify the skills and competencies high school students need to master for future success.

The Sunset Neighborhood Beacon Center (SNBC) recently released The Best of Both Worlds: Aligning Afterschool  Programs with Youth Development  Principles and Academic Standards to contribute to the growing body of  work that is deepening the quality of afterschool programming.  This  guide documents SNBC’s application of California Department of  Education content standards to innovative, project-based learning  clubs.  In so doing, this publication also demonstrates that youth development principles and standards-based education can coexist.&nbsp

Afterschool Investments recently released their National After School Profile. The profile contains demographic information on school-age youth, reviews various after school financing strategies, addresses the role of collaboration and alignment of community resources to support after school programs, highlights some quality efforts occurring nationally and includes information on the largest federal funding sources. To view the Afterschool Investments National Profile click here.

Learning Point Associates and the Collaborative for Building Afterschool Systems (CBASS) have recently released the Enhancing School Reform Through Expanded Learning report. The report explores the benefits of integrating expanded learning opportunities into overall school reform. The report finds that well designed expanded learning programs can improve overall school performance and increase positive academic, developmental and health outcomes.

The Cost of Quality Out-of-School Time Programs Study, Commissioned by the Wallace Foundation from The Finance Project and Public/Private Ventures, offers policy makers tools to use in planning quality out-of-school time programs. The study provides a data-filled examination of the costs associated with 111 diverse, quality Out-of-School Time (OST) programs in six cities. According to the study, costs vary widely depending on program goals, times of operation and the ages of children served.

This article by Robert Granger of the W.T. Grant Foundation examines program evaluation literature, observational studies, and commentaries to summarize after school programs impacts on academics, components of successful programming, and identifies approaches to program improvement.  To view this article, click here.

This report synthesizes the last 10 years of findings from Public/Private Ventures and other researchers' work to address one of the most demanding challenges facing today's after-school programs-how to create and manage programs that stand the best chance of producing specific, policy-relevant outcomes. It examines recruitment strategies that attract young people to activities, the qualities that make activities engaging and motivate participants to attend regularly, and the infrastructure-staffing, management and monitoring-needed to support such activities.

A new report from America's Promise Alliance has stunning data about the high school graduation rate in our nation's 50 largest cities: only about half (52 percent) of students in the main school systems actually finish high school with a diploma -- the number is as low as 35 percent in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and Indianapolis.