Evaluations Backgrounder: A Summary of Formal Evaluations of the Academic Impact of Afterschool Programs

Although afterschool programs for children have been operating for decades in some communities, the afterschool movement--the great national awakening to the opportunity afterschool offers--is just a few years old. As public demand for afterschool has grown, so has the demand for accountability. That is particularly true in afterschool programs that spend public dollars. After all, where tax dollars flow, so must accountability to taxpayers. Fortunately for afterschool advocates, a steady stream of afterschool evaluations are documenting gains for children, especially those who regularly participate in afterschool programs and those at highest risk of academic failure. This updated evaluations backgrounder includes summaries of: (1) a meta-analysis covering 35 studies, by Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL); (2) a meta-analysis covering 73 studies, by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL); (3) a study of 35 high-quality afterschool programs in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Michigan, Montana, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island, by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Policy Studies Associates, Inc.; (4) a new study of Chicago's After School Matters, by researchers at the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago; (5) a study of academically focused New Hampshire programs by the RMC Research Corporation; and (6) a new study of the five-city, California-based Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL), conducted by Public/Private Ventures. Summaries of other evaluations cover studies of LA's BEST, Citizen Schools, the YMCA of Greater New York's Virtual Y Program, the Young Scholars Program, Generacion Diez, 21st Century Community Learning Centers throughout Texas, the Massachusetts After-School Research Study, The After-School Corporation (TASC), Foundations Inc., Project Learn, San Diego's "6 to 6" and more. A list of the studies and their key findings is provided at the end of this document in Appendix A: Afterschool Evaluations at a Glance. This compilation focuses chiefly on evaluations of afterschool programs showing positive gains on student academic achievement. A second backgrounder, summarizes findings related to student safety, behavior, substance-abuse-prevention and discipline