the impact of after-school programs on middle-school students—policy implications

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POLICY ESSAY

The impact of after-school programs on middle-school students—Policy implications*

Shay BilchikGeorgetown University Public Policy InstituteCenter for Juvenile Justice Reform

The release of the study, “The impact of after-school programs on theroutine activities of middle-school students: Results from a randomized,controlled trial” (Cross, Gottfredson, Wilson, Rorie, and Connell, 2009,this issue), provides valuable information for policymakers and practition-ers interested in strengthening positive youth development opportunitiesand in reducing juvenile offending in this nation’s communities. Theauthors have enhanced our understanding of how best to use after-schoolprograms as an effective preventive service; however, as the study con-cludes, the use of this programmatic strategy is proving to be morecomplex than many thought to be the case. Indeed, the study raises thequestion as to what must be done to maximize the use of after-school pro-grams as a positive youth development and crime-fighting tool. In thisregard, its findings make the case for a more comprehensive set of policiesthat must accompany the use of after-school programs—one that builds onwhat we know about the potential for success in using an ecologic frame-work targeted at individual, school, family, peer, and community-basedinterventions.

As both a practitioner and a policymaker at various times in my career,it would be my hope that the study’s findings will help inform a morethoughtful approach to such interventions. There is a tendency to try tofind the “silver bullet” when seeking solutions to problems receivingheightened public attention, with the case of youth violence in Americabeing no exception. When this country experienced a dramatic increase injuvenile crime in the mid 1980s and early 1990s, there was a cry to respond

* The author thanks Kristina Rosinsky of the Georgetown Center for JuvenileJustice Reform for her assistance in the editing of this article. Direct correspondence toShay Bilchik, Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, Georgetown University, 3300Whitehaven St. NW, Suite 5000, Box 571444, Washington, DC 20057 (e-mail:[email protected]).

CRIMINOLOGY & Public PolicyVolume 8 Issue 2 Copyright 2009 American Society of Criminology

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quickly, forcefully, and effectively. This resulted in calls for and the even-tual implementation of tougher sentencing provisions, the construction oflarge new juvenile correctional facilities, and a move to transfer anincreasing number of juvenile offenders into the criminal justice system asadult offenders. Fortunately, this demand for greater accountability andharsher punishments was accompanied by a more reasoned and moreinformed call for a balanced approach to attacking juvenile offendingthrough the use of both effective prevention strategies and a system ofgraduated sanctions.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) inthe U.S. Department of Justice acted on this call for a balanced approachat the federal level. In 1993, it released its Comprehensive strategy for seri-ous, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders (Wilson, 1993)—followed in1995 by the publication of a guide for implementing the ComprehensiveStrategy (Howell, 1995). The Comprehensive Strategy was informed byresearch sponsored by OJJDP through the Causes and Correlates longitu-dinal research project (Huizinga, Loeber, and Thornberry, 1993), the workof the Seattle Social Development Project (Hawkins, Catalano, Morrison,O’Donnell, Abbott, and Day, 1992), and the National Council on Crimeand Delinquency, all of which supported the more holistic approach ofbringing together prevention and early intervention efforts with a systemof graduated sanctions. The guide for implementing the ComprehensiveStrategy provides a framework for developing and implementing the strat-egy, and it is based on the creation of a continuum of care (Howell, 1995).The continuum starts with prenatal prevention and includes community-based prevention services based on risk and resource assessment, immedi-ate interventions, and a range of graduated sanctions that includeprobation, institutional care, and aftercare services. These strategies arekey points along the continuum and are designed to reduce the risk factorsthat contribute to delinquent behavior.

After-school programs began receiving an increased level of attention asa preventive program after the release of Snyder, Sickmund, and Poe-Yamagata’s (1997) groundbreaking research report that found that mostarrests for youth violence occurred between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Consistentconceptually with the Comprehensive Strategy and building on the call inthe mid 1990s for more prevention efforts, this research set the stage forthe increased use of organized after-school activities and programs to pro-mote prosocial behavior and to prevent juvenile offending. Theassumption, as reiterated in the Cross et al. (2009) study, is that develop-ing and connecting youth to after-school activities will help reduce theoffending that otherwise would occur during these hours. As demon-strated by Cross et al., however, implementing effective after-schoolprograms to fight crime is more complicated than simply making programs


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available. In this case, several key issues and barriers were identified thatneed to be surmounted, among them that (1) the after-school program didnot draw in and gain regular attendance from youth who would otherwisespend the after-school hours with friends away from adults; and (2) theprogram did not effectively target a community that needed additionalafter-school activities for youth.

These barriers and challenges raise two questions: What else must bedone to use after-school programs more effectively, and what is the idealcontext within which an individual program must operate to be successful?I suggest that we need to turn to the more holistic approaches contem-plated by OJJDP in its Comprehensive Strategy and use the research thatinformed it to answer these questions. This calls for the implementation ofa national youth policy that mirrors what is happening in other countriesand that reflects the supports required around education, health, and theprovision of justice by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child—atreaty that the United States has not yet ratified (United Nations, 1989).The fact that the United States is the only developed country in the worldthat has not ratified the treaty is a sign of how far we have to go to create acommonly accepted set of rights that youth should expect as they grow intoadults. We need a unified vision for the country, something other nationsalready have to support positive youth development for their children.

For example, the United Kingdom passed two major pieces of legisla-tion in the past two decades that together have resulted in the frameworkfor a national youth policy. The Children’s Act of 1989 established therequirement that the same set of legal orders be used for all children—whether poor or advantaged. Although this law helped to create a com-mon legal platform for all children and youth in the United Kingdom, itwas not until the enactment of the Children’s Act of 2004 that the provi-sion of services and a focus on outcomes related to well-being (e.g.,education and health) were considered to be of paramount importance.The Children’s Act of 2004 requires every person and local authority thatdeals with children to work toward positive outcomes in their work. Thelaw will eventually result in the same set of services being available for allchildren, regardless of their socioeconomic status, with more servicesavailable in economically disadvantaged communities. This reflects theprinciple of “progressive universalism,” which is an important part of thethinking in the United Kingdom.

This change in law has lead to many reforms in the United Kingdomdesigned to meet these standards. In every local jurisdiction, a singleboard has been established to manage and organize services for childrenand a significant investment has been made in prevention, including posi-tive youth development supports provided, for example, through youthclubs and extended schools. Each local authority is also required to set up


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a “Trust,” a structure developed within the United Kingdom’s health ser-vice. Multiple agencies, including health, education, social care, police, andyouth justice, contribute funds to the Trust, which is then managed by aboard with representatives from each of those entities. Trusts are requiredto establish departments of children’s services, which replace variousdepartments (e.g., education, child welfare, and child protection). Addi-tionally, the law has facilitated the implementation of a rigorous set ofindicators and the availability of good data. Although the United King-dom seems to be struggling with the identification and implementation ofevidence-based practices that build on these data, it has accomplishedsomething that we have yet to achieve—a national framework and struc-ture for the implementation of programs that meet identified needs for itsyouth population through the use of national standards and measures (M.Little, personal communication, April 2, 2009).

A national youth policy in the United States would build off of what theUnited Kingdom has developed to create the broader context that wasmissing in the after-school program examined in this study. A nationalyouth policy would give us the structures to identify the needs of youthand to develop ways to address them in a holistic manner, not in an iso-lated fashion, as is now the case. What would drive and sustain this changewould be new measures and standards of success, such as academic per-formance, health, safety, proper emotional and physical development, andothers that focus more on improving positive outcomes for children ratherthan on reducing negative ones. This would require the examination of therisk and protective factors that exist in the communities in which youthlive to identify properly the needs of the children there and to target suc-cessfully youth most at risk. In an ecological construct, it would providefor the understanding of the risk factors presented in the context of fami-lies, peer groups, schools, and communities that an intervention such as anafter-school program must consider.

I suggest that the strategy developed in the Communities that Care pro-gram (Hawkins and Catalano, 2005), created from the research conductedin the Seattle Social Development Project and later incorporated into theguide to implement OJJDP’s Comprehensive Strategy, can be used todetermine the risk factors that need attention. In the program, data arestudied to identify the negative outcomes present in a particular commu-nity. Then, key stakeholders within the community develop workingcommittees tasked with determining which risk and protective factors arepresent that contribute to, or protect from, the identified negative out-comes. They then determine what activities and programs need to bedeveloped to fill the gaps that are determined to exist. This approachwould first be driven by the need to reduce negative outcomes; however,with the proper structures in place, the programs would be sustained by a


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focus on improving positive outcomes for youth—rather than being dis-continued once negative outcomes decrease. This will result in a morebalanced approach so that we can address negative outcomes, but alsopromote positive ones in order to build off of the strengths of youth.

Furthermore, instead of using this methodology of examining data andidentifying risk and protective factors in a select number of communitiesoutside of formal systems like it has been used in the past, it could be theapproach used by all communities. It could be incorporated into existingsystems of care, such as education, child welfare, and juvenile justice, toensure that any and all interventions by those systems promote the posi-tive outcomes outlined in a national youth policy and address real needs asidentified by the community.

By predicating the development of programs on the determination ofneeds and the desires of the youth and communities, we have the opportu-nity to overcome one of the weaknesses of the program examined in thisstudy—its failure to design a program that would attract at-risk youth whodo not take advantage of the existing after-school activities available tothem. In such a circumstance, innovative programs or entirely differentinterventions may be needed to ensure that the positive outcomes arebeing met. If, on the one hand, a program is implemented without thebenefit of this “due diligence,” it is nothing more than a silver bullet ofsorts, disconnected from a broader positive youth development strategy.If, on the other hand, an after-school program is developed after consider-ation of how youth otherwise spend their time (the competition for theirtime), where there are gaps in services, the needs of the families in thecommunity for supports and activities during the after-school hours, andthe academic needs of the students, it stands a better chance of fulfilling itspurpose and its promise.

When developing interventions such as after-school programs, it is alsoimportant to design programs in line with research on normal adolescentdevelopment—knowledge that should heavily inform any national youthpolicy. Adolescence naturally is a time of independence seeking for ouryoung people, so constant supervision is not possible or ideal. It is a timeduring which they prefer, and to some degree need, to be with their peers.It is this peer approval and the separation from adult authority figures thathelps them navigate their way to adulthood successfully. We know this tobe true from our own adolescent experiences, those of our children, andresearch on adolescent development (Steinberg and Silverberg, 1986).What makes this pathway difficult and dangerous for our youth to traverseis that recent research on adolescent brain development reinforces some-thing else we know from our own experiences—that the adolescent brainis not fully developed with regard to its capacity for competent decisionmaking (Steinberg, 2007) and the ability to resist peer pressure (Steinberg


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and Monahan, 2007). These two factors—the desire and need for indepen-dence, along with the lack of capacity to resist peer pressure—present acombustible formula that must be considered in any youth-related policiesor legislation. Striking a delicate balance between the normal and neces-sary adolescent need for independence and the need to make sure youthare adequately supervised is surely difficult but absolutely necessary. Ibelieve that the use of the risk and protective factor approach within thecontext of a national youth policy as suggested above provides this balanceand the opportunity for the more meaningful implementation of after-school programs. We should strive for a continuum of care that uses a multi-tude of interventions, with after-school programs being just one example,so that young people have enough protective factors to keep them out oftrouble and progressing toward positive outcomes even when unsupervised.

To implement this vision in which after-school programs and other inter-ventions are more effective, the United States needs to adopt a nationalyouth policy or take a legislative approach toward these issues. If OJJDPwere to return to its use of the Comprehensive Strategy as a core operat-ing construct and a renewed investment were made in Title V of theJuvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, we would have thestructure needed to support the implementation of after-school programsand other prevention and intervention programs with a greater likelihoodfor success. We would also be less likely to continue the debate on the bestbalance and course of action to reduce youth violence and improve out-comes more generally for our young people.

For this to occur, political will is needed. Fortunately, or perhaps unfor-tunately in terms of the exigency with which these issues are currentlybeing treated, we have seen a tremendous decrease in youth violence inthis country for almost a decade (Butts and Snyder, 2006). This is a wel-come turn of events, but it has led many of our leaders to lose focus on theneed to build on this downturn and avoid falling into the trap of believingthat our current youth-related outcomes and levels of youth violence aresomehow at acceptable levels. This tendency for our public and politicalwill to ebb and flow based on the exigencies at hand is not surprising, butit is a phenomenon we must resist, and this study and others like it provideus with a tool in this regard. Our challenge is to use these tools in develop-ing, in a strong and sustained manner, the elements of a comprehensiveapproach to positive youth development and the reduction of juvenileoffending so that we can create a new set of norms concerning how com-munities help their children—norms that demand a constant focus onyouth issues. A national youth policy would require such a focus, therebypreventing us from intervening only when problems develop or in a waythat is not appropriate for the circumstances. This is vital for our nation’s


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youth and is why policymakers should consider this perspective whenadopting individual strategies like after-school programs. The sooner acomprehensive approach is implemented, the sooner we will see betteroutcomes for our children.

References

Butts, Jeffrey A. and Howard N. Snyder. 2006. Too soon to tell: Deciphering trends inyouth violence. Retrieved April 13, 2009 from ncjjservehttp.org/NCJJwebsite/pdf/Howardpubs/CHIB110-YouthCrime.pdf. Chapin Hall Center for Children, Univer-sity of Chicago.

Cross, Amanda Brown, Denise C. Gottfredson, Denise M. Wilson, Melissa Rorie, andNadine Connell. 2009. The impact of after-school programs on the routine activitiesof middle school students: Results from a randomized, controlled trial. Criminology& Public Policy. This issue.

Hawkins, J. David and Richard F. Catalano. 2005. Investing in your community’s youth:An introduction to the Communities that Care system. Retrieved April 8, 2009 fromdownload.ncadi.samhsa.gov/Prevline/pdfs/ctc/Investing%20in%20Your%20Commu-nity%27s%20Youth.pdf.

Hawkins, J. David, Richard F. Catalano, Diane M. Morrison, Julie O’Donnell, RobertD. Abbott, and L. Edward Day. 1992. The Seattle Social Development Project:Effects of the first four years on protective factors and problem behaviors. In (JoanMcCord and Richard Tremblay, eds.), Preventing anti-social behavior: Interventionsfrom birth through adolescence. New York: Guilford Press.

Howell, James C. 1995. Guide for implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for serious,violent, and chronic juvenile offenders. Washington, DC: United States Departmentof Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Huizinga, David, Rolf Loeber, and Terence P. Thornberry. 1993. Longitudinal study ofdelinquency, drug use, sexual activity, and pregnancy among children and youth inthree cities. Public Health Reports, 108: 90–96.

Snyder, Howard N., Melissa Sickmund, and Eileen Poe-Yamagata. 1997. Juvenileoffenders and victims: 1997 update on violence. Washington, DC: United StatesDepartment of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Steinberg, Laurence. 2007. Risk taking in adolescence: New perspectives from brainand behavioral science. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16: 55–59.

Steinberg, Laurence and Kathryn C. Monahan. 2007. Age differences in resistance topeer influences. Developmental Psychology, 43: 1531–1543.

Steinberg, Laurence and Susan Silverberg. 1986. The vicissitudes of autonomy in earlyadolescence. Child Development, 57: 841–851.

United Nations. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Retrieved April 7, 2009from www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm.

Wilson, John J. and James C. Howell. 1993. Comprehensive Strategy for serious, violent,and chronic juvenile offenders. Washington, DC: United States Department of Jus-tice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.


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Shay Bilchik is the founder and director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform atGeorgetown University Public Policy Institute. Prior to joining the Institute in March2007, Bilchik was president and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America(CWLA), a position he held since February 2000. In 2001, 2004, 2005, and 2006, he wasnamed among The NonProfit Times Power and Influence Top 50 for making his mark inthe public policy arena and championing child welfare issues. Prior to his tenure atCWLA, Shay headed up the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention(OJJDP) in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he advocated for and supported abalanced and multi-systems approach to attacking juvenile crime. Before coming to thenation’s capital, Bilchik was Assistant State Attorney in Miami, Florida from1977–1993, where he served as trial lawyer, juvenile division chief, and Chief AssistantState Attorney. Bilchik earned his B.S. and J.D. degrees from the University of Florida.

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