Current Work

	Greentree Conference » In the summer of 2007 The Center for After-School Excellence convened a meeting in Long Island of many of the nation’s leading scholars on after-school. The goal of the Greentree Conference was to share their perspectives on program quality, child and youth engagement and outcomes, and professional development of staff. Participants presented their research and discussed what the after-school research agenda should be, now that there is wide acceptance of the benefits of quality after-school programs.

The Center for After-School Excellence conducts ongoing research and evaluations of after-school programs. The research department also convenes scholars and researchers on issues of interest to the after-school field.

Team members make presentations to professional organizations and publish their findings. Through their work, they offer guidance to after-school providers on staffing and other organizational practices that can contribute to running high-quality after-school programs.

The research team's current projects include the following:

Program Evaluations of 21st Century Community Learning Centers

The Center currently provides evaluation services to 108 after-school programs in New York City which receive funding through the federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. These programs serve approximately 20,000 students. The goals of the evaluations are to:

• Measure the impact these programs have in supporting participants' academic, social, and personal development
• Measure the quality of after-school activities so staff can use that information to support programs' continuous improvement
• Support the research team in working with program staff to ensure they are in full compliance with their reporting requirements. To achieve these goals, Center evaluators collect data on individual programs from multiple sources. These include official school records, participant surveys, and researchers' observations of program activities. These evaluations are designed to be both practical and to generate findings that are methodologically sound.

Members of the Center staff presented findings from the 21st Century Community Learning Centers study at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The team focused on whether four dimensions of program quality had an effect on the learning outcomes of program participants, including their performance on standardized math and English tests and their classroom engagement (as reported by teachers). The research team found positive associations between program attendance and all three learning outcomes. They found that program quality affects students' engagement in class activities and their performance on math assessments, but not their performance on reading assessments.

Study on the Staffing Practices of High-Quality After-School Programs

Center researchers have recently completed a study of staffing and other organizational practices that distinguish high quality after-school programs. The study builds on ongoing evaluation of 21st Century Community Learning Center programs by The After-School Corporation (TASC) and the Center.

Researchers analyzed program quality and attendance data collected during the 2005-06 school year to identify ten high and ten lower performing after-school sites from this pool of programs. Center researchers conducted additional field research, interviews with program staff and youth worker surveys to learn more about the organizational features that contribute to strong and weak program practices, including hiring, supervision, compensation, and training.

Across these participating sites, researchers found distinguishing organizational features that differentiated high- and lower-quality programs, including differences in the ways programs hire, supervise and train frontline staff. These include:

• Program coordinators at high-quality programs exercised greater autonomy in hiring decisions, including having final decision-making authority over all staff working at their site;
• Frontline staff in high-quality programs had higher levels of education and were more likely to be currently enrolled in college or graduate school
• High-quality programs were more likely to hire staff with relevant prior work experience;
• Staff members at high-quality programs were more likely to describe participants' social and emotional development as goals of their after-school program
• High-quality programs were more likely to utilize a team-teaching model, with two-person teams providing instruction rather than a single staff member
• High-quality programs were more likely to require frontline staff to write and submit lesson plans and their supervisors were more likely to use those lesson plans as an opportunity to provide feedback
• High-quality program staff received more training and were more likely to participate in training that addressed after-school activity content, including training on how to implement specific curricula
• High-quality program staff reported a more positive staff climate with respect to their enjoyment of work in after-school, and their commitment; access to technology and resources involvement in program planning and operations, and opportunities to share ideas with other staff.

Researchers did not find significant differences between higher and lower quality programs with respect to compensation rates or staff years of experience with their organizations.

This study was completed with support from the Cornerstones for Kids Foundation.