Priscilla M. D. Little

Strengthen What Happens outside School to Improve What Happens inside.

F ederal education legislation has long assumed that K-12 schools could operate alone to level the learning field for poor children. But 40 years of steadily accumulating research has shown that this assumption is incorrect. We now know that opportunities for after-school learning, summer learning, and support for families are major predictors of children’s development, educational achievement, and school success. Research also suggests that economically and otherwise disadvantaged children are less likely than their more-advantaged peers to have access to these out-of-school or complementary learning opportunities and that this inequity substantially undermines their development and chances for school success. This research confirms that America will not achieve its national goals of equal educational opportunity, leaving no child behind, or preparing its workforce and citizenry for 21st-century challenges without addressing the importance of and inequities in out-of-school learning opportu-

Evaluating afterschool programs

Well-implemented afterschool programs can promote a range of positive learning and developmental outcomes. However, not all research and evaluation studies have shown the benefits of participation, in part because programs and their evaluation were out of sync. This chapter provides practical guidance on how to foster that alignment between program and evaluation design. It begins with a discussion of why afterschool programs should develop and use a theory of change to guide program development, implementation, and evaluation. It then describes how to develop a logic model to depict program theory. It concludes with an overview of an approach to evaluation that ensures programs use evaluation information to improve and refine programming prior to using information for accountability purposes.