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Accountability for After-School Care

Accountability for After-School Care: Devising Standards and Measuring Adherence to Them

Megan Beckett
Angela Hawken
Alison Jacknowitz
Copyright Date: 2001
Edition: 1
Published by: RAND Corporation
Pages: 124
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/mr1411ssccp
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  • Book Info
    Accountability for After-School Care
    Book Description:

    Increasing numbers of children are participating in after-school programs, and with more federal and state funding the number of such programs is likely to grow. This growth has been occurring, however, with little guidance as to what program features or practices might be most helpful in nurturing the educational achievement, emotional development, and health of the children involved. This book helps fill that need for guidance by offering a set of 18 model practices against which after-school programs can be evaluated. The authors provide ways to score adherence to the criteria, from excellent to inadequate; survey forms for collecting the information to assign these grades; and an illustrative application of their approach to a set of real-world after-school programs.

    eISBN: 978-0-8330-3382-6
    Subjects: Education, Population Studies

Table of Contents

  1. Front Matter
    (pp. i-ii)
  2. PREFACE
    (pp. iii-iv)
  3. Table of Contents
    (pp. v-vi)
  4. FIGURES
    (pp. vii-viii)
  5. TABLES
    (pp. ix-x)
  6. SUMMARY
    (pp. xi-xvi)
  7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    (pp. xvii-xviii)
  8. ACRONYMS
    (pp. xix-xx)
  9. Chapter One INTRODUCTION
    (pp. 1-2)

    Several long-term trends have led to increased interest on the part of the American public in how and where children spend their time after school. First, the percentage of parents at home when school lets out has steadily declined over the past several decades. A second trend is the growing number of highly publicized violent incidents involving children and adolescents. Third, a move toward academic accountability has increased attention to after-school programs as a means of improving school performance.

    In response to these concerns, the number of after-school programs has steadily risen over the past decade. In 1997, 16 percent...

  10. Chapter Two IDENTIFYING AFTER-SCHOOL CARE PRACTICES
    (pp. 3-32)

    In designing our approach to identifying practices, we turned first to the business literature in which methods for deriving the concept originated. “Best practices,” in business terminology, refer to documented strategies and tactics used by better-performing companies.¹ A small industry consisting of organizations and consultants has emerged to help business executives identify and implement practices that can improve their own organizations.² The approaches taken vary across practitioners but generally consist of identifying a list of organizations that are top performers in their class and approaching these top performers about participating in the study. Site visits are then made to organizations...

  11. Chapter Three MEASURING ADHERENCE TO AFTER-SCHOOL CARE PRACTICES
    (pp. 33-50)

    In this chapter, we describe how we measured adherence to the after-school practices identified in the previous chapter for our sponsor, Stone Soup Child Care Programs.

    Stone Soup Child Care Programs is a nonprofit organization supported by contributions from foundations, corporations and local businesses, government, and individuals. Stone Soup provides after-school programs in low-income communities in California. The stated objective of Stone Soup is to ensure “quality child care for school-age children that is safe, dependable, and affordable through a managed program of shared resources and goals.” Since its inception in 1987, enrollment in Stone Soup after-school programs has grown...

  12. Chapter Four ADHERENCE TO AFTER-SCHOOL CARE PRACTICES BY STONE SOUP PROGRAMS: RESULTS
    (pp. 51-60)

    In this chapter, we describe how we used the information collected from the sample of Stone Soup programs to evaluate the overall adherence of the programs to the 18 practices moderately and strongly supported by the literature review in Chapter One. We also summarize some of the recommendations we made on the basis of this assessment. This section discusses how we attempted to identify characteristics of programs that adhere uniformly well or poorly to good practices. We conclude this section with a discussion of limitations we encountered in our analysis and discuss ways to overcome them in future efforts.

    To...

  13. Chapter Five SUMMARY
    (pp. 61-64)

    Several long-term trends have led to increased interest on the part of the American public in how and where children spend their time after school: (1) a decline in the percentage of parents who stay at home, (2) recent highly publicized incidents of violence involving children and adolescents, and (3) a nationwide move toward academic accountability and increasing the role of after-school programs as a means of improving school performance. In response to these concerns, the number of after-school programs has steadily risen over the past decade. Increased federal and state funding suggests that the number of such programs will...

  14. Appendix A LIST OF PUBLICATIONS REVIEWED
    (pp. 65-76)
  15. Appendix B SUMMARY OF STUDIES/REPORTS REVIEWED
    (pp. 77-84)
  16. Appendix C SURVEY INSTRUMENTS
    (pp. 85-100)
  17. REFERENCES
    (pp. 101-106)