After-school programs as anti-poverty intervention

The structural problem is that the American school day ends roughly three hours before the American work day ends. That gap has existed in roughly its current form since mass employment patterns shifted in the mid-twentieth century, and it has never been seriously addressed at the policy level. What we have instead is a patchwork — after-school programs for some children, latchkey arrangements for others, extended family for others, the street for others. The patchwork is highly stratified by income and is the proximate cause of a substantial share of the developmental inequality that accumulates across childhood.

Robert Halpern's work on after-school programs argues that they have suffered from a kind of institutional confusion. They have been pulled in three directions — academic remediation, recreation, and youth development — by different funders with different goals, and the resulting programs have tried to be all three and ended up being none of them well. His prescription is that after-school programs should be allowed to be what they are good at being, which is sites of skilled adult attention and developmental opportunity, and that the academic-remediation pressure should be released so the programs can do their actual work.

Reed Larson's longitudinal studies of adolescent time use show that the experience of intrinsic motivation — sustained effort directed at a self-chosen goal with the experience of competence developing over time — happens primarily in voluntary structured activities. It does not happen in school, where the motivation is mostly extrinsic. It does not happen in unstructured leisure, where the engagement is mostly passive. It happens in the sports team, the band, the youth group, the chess club, the arts program. Access to these activities is therefore not a luxury. It is a developmental necessity.

When after-school programs are evaluated against test-score outcomes, the effect sizes are small. When they are evaluated against engagement, attendance, behavior, social-emotional development, and longer-term outcomes like high school graduation, the effect sizes are larger. The mixed picture in the published literature partly reflects this evaluation-frame mismatch. Programs that are designed for developmental outcomes are being evaluated on academic outcomes, and the resulting findings are then used to question whether the programs work. They work. They work at what they are designed for.

The hours of three to six are also the hours when juvenile crime peaks. After-school programs that draw adolescents into structured supervised settings during those hours measurably reduce juvenile crime in the affected neighborhoods. This is not subtle in the data. The cost-benefit analysis from this angle alone makes after-school programs one of the most cost-effective public-safety investments available, and yet they are rarely funded out of public-safety budgets, which means the constituency that benefits most from them is not the constituency that votes for them.

A central reason after-school programs work is that they offer children a chance to develop competence at something they care about, with adult guidance, over enough time that the competence becomes real. A child who learns to play the violin, to wrestle competitively, to draw, to code, to debate — that child has had a particular kind of developmental experience that becomes part of their sense of self. The experience is not interchangeable with academic achievement. It complements it. Children who have had such experiences carry the capacity to seek them out again in adulthood. Children who have not, often do not.

After-school programs are typically staffed by part-time workers paid hourly at low wages, with high turnover and minimal benefits. This staffing model is incompatible with the developmental model the programs aspire to. The relationship between a child and an adult mentor takes time to build. Staff who leave after a year, or three months, do not get to be that adult. The funding levels available for after-school work do not allow for the staffing stability that the developmental outcomes require. The model is being asked to produce relational continuity on a labor budget that prevents it.

Good after-school programs cluster where their funding can be sustained — affluent districts with parent fees, urban areas with sustained philanthropic interest, and the subset of low-income communities where federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants have landed. Vast stretches of the country, particularly suburban poverty pockets and rural areas, have minimal coverage. The geography of access does not match the geography of need. The children whose three-to-six hours are most consequential are routinely the ones with no program available.

Some of the most effective implementations co-locate after-school programs in the school building itself, which solves the transportation problem (children stay where they already are), the space problem (the building is empty after three), and the recruitment problem (the school knows which children most need the program). The barrier is usually labor-contract and liability issues, plus the school's own institutional ambivalence about extending its building's use beyond the school day. When those barriers are negotiated, the model works well.

Everything that is true about the three-to-six gap is more true about summer. The summer learning loss literature documents that low-income children fall further behind during summer breaks, and the gap is a substantial driver of the cumulative achievement gap by middle school. Summer programs that work look a lot like good after-school programs — sustained, developmental, relational — but the funding and infrastructure for them is even thinner. The summer camp landscape is even more stratified by income than the after-school landscape, and the consequences track.

The after-school field has learned, painfully, that programs do not scale like products. What works in one community with one set of staff and one set of children does not necessarily transfer. The programs that have scaled successfully — Citizen Schools, Boys and Girls Clubs, certain YMCA models — have done so by codifying a model loose enough to allow local adaptation while tight enough to preserve the developmental core. The scaling is slow and expensive and does not match the timeline that public funders typically operate on.

A piece of the after-school argument that gets less attention is its function as a parental work support. A reliable after-school program is a precondition for many low-income parents to hold the jobs they hold. When the program closes for a week, the parent misses work. When the program does not exist, the parent works fewer hours or takes a worse-fitting job. The economic mobility literature is increasingly clear that childcare access — and after-school care is part of that — is one of the biggest constraints on parental labor force participation, particularly for mothers. After-school programs are family economic policy as well as child development policy.

A community that takes Law 3 seriously about the three-to-six gap would do three concrete things. First, map every after-school program in the area, who they serve, what they cost, and what their waitlists are — this exercise is rarely done and usually surfaces a clear pattern. Second, fund the programs operating in low-income neighborhoods at levels that allow staffing stability and developmental quality, not just custodial supervision. Third, treat the school day as if it ended at six rather than three, and design accordingly — physical space, transportation, staffing, food. None of this is conceptually difficult. All of it has been left undone for sixty years, and the children who most needed it grew up while we waited.

1. Halpern, Robert. Making Play Work: The Promise of After-School Programs for Low-Income Children. New York: Teachers College Press, 2003.

2. Larson, Reed W. "Toward a Psychology of Positive Youth Development." American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 170–183.

3. Halpern, Robert. The Means to Grow Up: Reinventing Apprenticeship as a Developmental Support in Adolescence. New York: Routledge, 2009.

4. Larson, Reed W., and Maryse H. Richards. Divergent Realities: The Emotional Lives of Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

5. Halpern, Robert. "A Different Kind of Child Development Institution: The History of After-School Programs for Low-Income Children." Teachers College Record 104, no. 2 (2002): 178–211.

6. Larson, Reed W. "Positive Development in a Disorderly World." Journal of Research on Adolescence 21, no. 2 (2011): 317–334.

7. Halpern, Robert. After-School Programs for Low-Income Children: Promise and Challenges. Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children, 1999.

8. Larson, Reed W., Kathrin Walker, and Nickki Pearce. "A Comparison of Youth-Driven and Adult-Driven Youth Programs: Balancing Inputs from Youth and Adults." Journal of Community Psychology 33, no. 1 (2005): 57–74.

9. Halpern, Robert. "The Promise of After-School Programs for Low-Income Children." Early Childhood Research Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1999): 81–95.

10. Larson, Reed W., and Suman Verma. "How Children and Adolescents Spend Time Across the World: Work, Play, and Developmental Opportunities." Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 6 (1999): 701–736.

11. Halpern, Robert. Critical Issues in After-School Programming. Chicago: Herr Research Center for Children and Social Policy, 2006.

12. Larson, Reed W., Jodi Dworkin, and Linda Hansen. "Adolescents' Initiative in Youth Activities." Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois, 2002.