After School Program Evaluation
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Challenge
When youth in urban, low-income neighborhoods participate consistently in a structured after-school program supervised by a caring adult, they are less likely to use drugs, drop out of school, or become teenaged parents. Unfortunately, less than 20% of urban youth are enrolled in such programs. Research-based literature does not explain why after-school activities fail to attract youth in need or how successful programs are sustained. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's After School Project provides an opportunity to examine long-term success among city-wide initiatives to scale up after-school programs. The foundation is sponsoring an evaluation of the critical elements of sustained efforts and a comparison of case studies of after-school initiatives. To inform program managers across the country, the evaluation must assess common features, problems, and solutions of city-wide initiatives with very different goals, objectives, structures, and environments.
Strategy
Axiom's Conwal Division specializes in technical research and evaluation of health and human services programs. Under contract to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, our experts are conducting a five-year evaluation of case studies in four cities that are expanding after school opportunities. The evaluation team first developed a model that identified the characteristics of an effective city-wide after-school initiative. Next, the team collected extensive baseline data through site visits, interviews, and documentary research. This provided a clear description of the quality guidance, promotion, advocacy, and planning of the expanded program activities. Future site visits, interviews, and surveys will track each initiative's evolution, and when complete, Conwal's study will provide the first comparison of the long-term management of after-school initiatives.
Impact
The study moves research on after-school programs from narrower assessments of preferred curricula to the broader issue of how communities can successfully grow and sustain this type of service delivery for thousands of youth in need. Previous research conducted for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation led the country in developing community-based long-term care of the aged and city-wide health promotion. Conwal's evaluation will strengthen the foundation's ability to offer similar research-based analysis of elements of success for after-school initiatives. The After School Project may dramatically change the blueprints cities use to expand youth participation in after-school activities. The need for research-based guidance is a matter of national importance as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers-the largest funding source for after-school activities-has been transferred to state governments under the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2002.