Commentary

Don't Make After-School Care the Next Big Myth

Megan Beckett is a social scientist at RAND.

PHOTO: DIANE BALDWIN

As more and more families find they need two breadwinners to make ends meet (and as welfare reform has led to more single parents who work), the number of "latch-key kids"—kids left to fend for themselves after school—has grown in the past several decades. Moreover, as parents worry about how their children will fare in an increasingly competitive society, the desire to provide them with academically enriching experiences continues to grow. There is also the ever-present concern that many kids left to their own devices will drift toward risky behaviors, like drug use or delinquency.

Increasingly, "after-school care" programs are being viewed as a panacea for these and other social and educational concerns. These programs typically provide a variety of activities—socializing, free time, games, reading, homework time, physically active play, and arts and crafts—for kids from ages 6 to 12. The programs are proliferating, and public money to support them is growing astronomically. For example, the budget for the largest single source of funding for after-school care, the federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers, increased tenfold from about $1 million annually in 1997 to $1 billion annually today.

In an era of scarce public resources and accountability, we need to know whether after-school care programs can meet the expectations pinned on them. The short answer is "we don't know."

In arguing for the value of after-school care programs, proponents point to the results from numerous program evaluations to bolster their claims, but a closer reading of those evaluations shows that few, if any, of the claimed results can be attributed to participation in these programs. While promising, these results are based on evaluations that suffer from a myriad of problems, ranging from poor measures of student outcomes, to inadequate (or, in many cases, no) control groups of students not in after-school care programs, to a failure to test if effects are statistically significant.

Attributing a real benefit to a program requires a convincing evaluation, such as a "gold standard" study where some kids are randomly assigned to participate in a program while other kids are not. Over a few months, to a year, to many years, differences in how well the kids in the two groups are doing can be measured, and if the kids were truly randomly assigned, changes in outcomes could be attributed to program participation.

No such convincing studies of after-school care programs have been done, and the field is at about the same stage as the school-based drug-use prevention field two decades ago. At that time, vast quantities of money were being funneled into subsequently disproved program strategies or into programs like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) that had not been carefully evaluated. Later evaluations also showed that D.A.R.E. had very little or no effect and that the costs were not justified. As a result, the federal government has pushed for adopting better-designed programs, like Project ALERT, that have rigorous evaluations and yield credible and positive results.

Such evaluations have shown that drug prevention can work and, perhaps even more important, have helped to confirm the value of these programs to policymakers who fund them. Moreover, such evaluations have shown which drug intervention programs work and which do not, critical information for schools selecting a drug prevention program to implement.

Clearly, such rigorous evaluations are needed in the after-school care field. Many practitioners claim that such evaluations cannot be done; however, they were done—and done successfully—in the drug-prevention field as well as in the child care field. As new programs proliferate, they should not only be well designed but also have a rigorous evaluation design built in from the start. Only then will policymakers and the public have credible grounds for determining whether to continue to fund those programs or to redirect the money to more-effective alternative programs.