Out-of-School Time

The expansion of the Common Core State Standards in education opens new doors for out-of-school time (OST) providers to align their work with schools.

Karen Pittman, Co-founder of the Ready by 21 National Partnership asks: Even if students graduate, are they really equipped for the next stage?

Expanded Learning Time Does Not Equal Expanded Learning (click to download the PDF)

Everyone who runs a youth program believes in their hearts that their program helps kids – but in their heads, they know they need convincing data to prove it.

This new guide from the Forum for Youth Investment – From Soft Skills to Hard Data: Measuring Youth Program Outcomes – is here to help them get it.

In this commentary, we compile lessons learned about building quality improvement systems for OST programs, based on emerging research and increasing activity in the field. We also take readers to two places – the state of Michigan and the city of Chicago – where implementation of this model is underway with promising results.

This commentary takes readers on a cross-country tour of after-school innovation – from northern and southern California to Chicago, New York and New Hampshire. In On the Ground we describe two very different school-based models in California.

After-school programs can have a positive impact on academic, social and emotional outcomes. Not all programs do, however, which makes quality a top priority for practice and policy. At Making a Difference in After School - Measuring and Improving After School Quality, Nicole Yohalem and Bob Granger of the William T.

Nicole Yohalem will discuss the relationship between outcomes and measures of quality and describe characteristics of quality assessment and improvement systems in an upcoming Afterschool Investments webinar: Systems Building Challenges for Afterschool Initiatives: Developing Common Measures of Quality, Thursday, February 19 from 1:00 pm–2:30 pm EST.