August 17, 2018
Activities: Education, Youth Development
Geography:
Demographics:
Annual ROI: 0.0%
Image source: Associated Press
For governments, schools and nonprofits looking to make a difference in kids’ lives, graduation rate is one of the most overused indicators of success.
Yes, your goal is to improve the likelihood that a child succeeds in life, and what better (or easier) measure is there than whether he graduates or not? But as many detractors point out, up-front investment into single, localized programs have a real possibility of diminishing impact as the student moves on from the program and down his normal trajectory.
Is this accurate?
Studies have been done that show the impact of successful investments in after-school programming. And these impacts go beyond mere graduation rates, which by themselves, mean nothing.
In fact, economic analysis demonstrates the gains attributed to program participants through high school, into college, and into middle age and beyond. One of the most impressive actors here is CYCLE, with its after-school programs offered in the notoriously downtrodden Cabrini Green area in Chicago.
Out-of-school ventures have a decidedly mixed track record, especially those in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage like Cabrini-Green. How could it be otherwise? How could a program that filled a couple of hours of a child’s daily life make any difference in such an inhospitable world? But CYCLE bucked the odds.
Here’s why attention should be paid: About 90 percent of the youngsters who participated in its scholarship programs and mentoring activities graduated from high school, and about a third went to college. That’s astonishing, but what’s more astonishing still are the long-term reverberations.
The CYCLE alumni are now middle-aged, and the impact of the program continues to be felt. Among the alumni are two medical doctors, 11 with doctorates, and a host of master’s degree-holders. Most of the alums, McLaughlin noted, “live middle-class lives; they are teachers, social workers, small business owners, administrators, coaches.”
“The impressive accomplishments … show that the negative outcomes predicted for kids who grow up in concentrated poverty like Cabrini-Green … are not inevitable,” she wrote. “They result not from a so-called ‘culture of poverty’ but from a poverty of opportunities.”
Merely throwing money at a problem does not guarantee success, however. So what made CYCLE so different than many other similar, yet less successful programs across the country? They adapted to the community being served and took a longer-term view of the impacts they were trying to achieve.
Lesson two — take the long view. Most education research adopts a short time horizon, rarely looking at the impact of a program beyond two or three years. But the Perry study lasted for decades, and that made all the difference. Had the researchers ended the study after third grade, as so many studies of preschool do these days, they would have concluded that the Westinghouse report was right and that preschool’s effects dissipate. Only later — sometimes decades later — did the full significance of the program emerge.
When thinking about the long-term effects of improvement in children’s life trajectories, it is easy to count the potential economic impacts. Higher school attainment leads to higher lifetime earnings, upward economic mobility, more stability in raising a family and providing better for the next generation.
Programs like CYCLE offer unique models that should be studied and leveraged in other communities looking to invest in their future.
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