Citizen Schools: Putting Students on a Pathway to Academic and Social Success

A Forum — September 22, 2006

At this forum on Capitol Hill, participants discussed the implications for students, educators and policymakers of new evidence that the positive effects from regular participation in a high quality afterschool program for students in Grades 6-8 persist after the students enter high school.

The latest evidence comes from the third year of results from a multi-year external evaluation by Policy Studies Associates of the impact of Citizens Schools, which opened its first afterschool program in Boston in 1995 and this year serves 3,000 middle school youth and engages 2,200 adult volunteers at 30 campuses in five states – California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina and Texas. The PSA report, Putting Students on a Pathway to Academic and Social Success: Phase III Findings of the Citizen Schools Evaluation, was released in November 2005 and can be found on both the Citizen Schools and PSA websites.

Eric Schwarz, president and co-founder of Citizen Schools, said the widely recognized nonprofit education network plans to operate at 80 program sites in 30 cities in 10 states by 2012. Its broader goal is to stimulate changes in public policy that will allow Citizen Schools and other effective out-of-school time programs to serve adolescents from low-income families throughout the nation.

Schwarz outlined the core beliefs behind the Citizen Schools model. One is that middle school years mark the point at which low-income students start to fall far behind high-income students on the pathway to higher academic or vocational education that leads to economic success and social involvement. Another is that even those with poor grades can get back onto the pathway to success if they obtain three benefits: More time to learn, more relationships with caring adults, and more relevance to the real world. Another belief is that, in order to retain knowledge, people need not just to hear, see and discuss something, but also to do it and teach it to others.

Citizen Schools works with public middle schools to identify and recruit struggling low-income students for three to four hours a day of afterschool activities. Its curriculum includes apprenticeships with adult mentors, supervised homework, help with study skills and goal-setting, and recreational activities Monday through Thursday (and Friday at some sites) throughout the school year.

A key strategy used by Citizen Schools to encourage regular attendance is to include 10-week apprenticeships in its school-year program. In these courses, full-time and part-time staff educators recruit and guide volunteer “citizen teachers” who work with small teams of youth to produce products and performances that culminate in a public presentation called a “Wow!” A “Wow!” varies according to the occupations of the citizen teachers. For example, one was a mock trial in a federal courtroom for those who apprenticed with lawyers. Others have included a presentation to a city planning commission on how to develop a 26-acre park, a briefing for parents on how much and how to save for their child’s college education, and a cable-televised performance of a mixture of hip-hop and modern dancing before an audience of several hundred in a community theater.

“Small-size groups, hands-on experience and an opportunity to teach what you’ve learned lead to higher authentic learning,” Schwarz said.

To minimize staff turnover, which is higher in afterschool programs that rely heavily on part-time employees, Citizen School partners with host schools and other nonprofits that can use extra help during school hours to guarantee a full-time job and graduate-level scholarships to National Teaching Fellows who pledge to stay with the program for two years.

Lara Fabiano, a senior researcher at Policy Studies Associates, which has been tracking 855 Citizen Schools participants and 855 similar students from the Boston Public Schools since 2001, said analysis of data gathered through the 2003-04 school year shows that Citizen Schools (1) attracted educationally at-risk students, (2) provided a program that students attended regularly and enjoyed, and (3) put participants on a path toward success. She described those as “noteworthy findings, because so many low-income students have low achievement and don’t have the skills they need to succeed in high schools.”

Among the findings:

• Citizen Schools is reaching its target group. Its students are more likely than their peers to be students of color, from low-income families and scoring at the lowest level on state tests of math and English language arts.
• Students stick with and like the program. Half to three quarters of the Citizen Schools students participated at rates of 60 percent or higher. Among those who began the program as sixth graders, 60 percent stayed in as seventh graders and 25 percent stayed in as eighth graders. Students surveyed said they felt a strong connection to the program, had positive relationships with staff and other students, and could play leadership roles and participate in hands-on learning activities.
• School performance improves. In their first year in Citizens Schools, students in Grades 6 and 7 improved in school attendance, promotion to the next grade, and test scores in English language arts, and were less likely to be suspended from school.
• Dosage matters. The program had the greatest effect on those who attended regularly (60 percent or more of the days). They improved their course grades in English and math significantly in the first year and less dramatically in the second year (which subsequently led to the seventh grade curriculum being redesigned). As eighth graders, they were more than twice as likely as their peers to enroll in one of the city’s college-track high schools.
• Once in high school, they earned higher grade point averages (2.2 vs. 1.74 for the peer group) and higher math grades (2.0 vs. 1.42 for the peer group), were slightly more likely (86% vs. 82%) to be promoted to Grade 10 on time, and were less likely to be suspended.

“But we’re still talking of basic or below-level performance,” Fabiano said. “So, even if they’ve been helped by Citizen Schools, continued support is likely to be needed in the high school years.”

Christopher Harris, Citizen Schools campus director at the McKinley Community School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said one of his biggest day-to-day challenges is countering a popular youth culture that supports individualism over service, rewards acting dumb, and stimulates an appetite for “glitz, glamour, big cars and jewelry,” without revealing the sacrifices, planning and tedious work that acquiring such prizes requires.

A successful program also requires negotiating multiple interests, he pointed out. Administrators don’t want participants to break anything, teachers want the classrooms to be neat after participants go home, grantmakers want accountability reports, volunteers must be located and wooed, homework support time for students must be tight and focused, and parents must get calls about their child’s activities at least every other week.

But Citizen Schools also brings multiple rewards that don’t show up in statistics, Harris said. Among his favorite moments: Excited youth returning from a police apprenticeship to tell how they used dogs to find contraband in a park, a teacher mentioning that a participant’s math grade went up from a C to a C-plus, volunteers and staff members sitting around at the end of the day to discuss the program and national education reforms, and, as a line of girls hold hands and come out to take a bow at the end of a performance, the emergence of “a strong feeling that we must be doing something right.”

Policy and Practice Implications

Schwarz then talked about how to scale up Citizen Schools and other effective afterschool programs for early adolescents. He lamented that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation, usually paraphrased as “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” doesn’t apply often enough to successful nonprofit programs.

“Sometimes, [after a couple years of funding] foundations will say, ‘Congratulations, you’re on your own.’ Government will say, ‘That’s a good idea and we hope other people will put money into it,’” he said.

To counter that, Citizen Schools plans to continue internal and external evaluations and adjust its program based on the results, spread to 10 states, and try to reframe the debate over support for afterschool programs as Congress next year takes up the question of the reauthorization of the expiring No Child Left Behind Act.

Schwarz asked the educators and policymakers at the forum to consider supporting three new federal initiatives:

• Fund 500 “break the mold” schools, selected by competition among public schools and districts, in which youth get 35 percent more learning time delivered by teachers and community partners. Estimated cost: $450 million.
• Place 10,000 outstanding college graduates in afterschool programs through a program modeled on Teach for America. Estimated cost: $150 million, plus a matching $150 million from recipient organizations.
• Address the high school dropout crisis by scaling up proven models of prevention and enrichment programs that increase engagement in high schools. Estimated cost: $400 million, plus matching $400 million from recipient organizations.

In the question-and-answer session, Schwarz said the Citizen Schools model costs between $2,500 and $3,000 per student per year, and could for well-established sites could go down to $2,000 as the program scales up. Fabiano said plans are being made for a national evaluation, but the follow-up studies in Boston will continue for several years in order to measure the program’s longitudinal impact.

Resources

Citizen Schools www.citizenschools.org
Policy Studies Associates, Inc. www.policystudies.com

Presenter Bios

Eric Schwarz is President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Citizen Schools, Inc., a national model afterschool and summer initiative that was founded in Boston in 1995. Citizen Schools seeks to revolutionize how children spend their out-of-school time and has been cited as a national quality leader by a number of organizations including the American Business Collaborative, The Benton Foundation’s Connect For Kids Campaign, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Demos, Fast Company magazine, MassINC, the C.S. Mott Foundation, the National Institute for Out of School Time, and the U.S. Department of Education. Mr. Schwarz is a graduate of the University of Vermont and holds a master's degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. 

Chris Harris is currently serving as the campus director of the New Brunswick, New Jersey Citizen Schools campus. He is an experienced educator and a deeply committed youth mentor. For the past three years, Mr. Harris has served as an adjunct professor in William Paterson University’s African, African-American, and Caribbean Studies department, teaching courses in race and justice, and racism and sexism. He also teaches courses in Afro-American psychology and analytical thinking for the W.E.B. DuBois Scholars Institute, a nonprofit leadership development institute that serves high-achieving Black and Latino high school students. Mr. Harris has a master’s degree in Professional Studies from Cornell University’s Africana Studies & Research Center and will begin doctoral study in Community Psychology at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology in the fall.      

Lara Fabiano is a senior researcher at Policy Studies Associates (PSA), a firm that conducts research and evaluation in education and youth development. She is an expert in the design, analysis, and reporting of studies focusing on youth development and school reform. Ms. Fabiano’s work integrates quantitative and qualitative data to help inform decision making at the program and policy levels. For the past five years, Ms. Fabiano has directed the longitudinal evaluation of Citizen Schools. In addition, she directs the evaluation of the W.K. Kellogg Youth Innovation Fund for Youth-Directed Civic Action initiative. Ms. Fabiano has played a critical role in numerous studies at PSA, including the City Year Alumni Studies, the evaluation of Whole-School Improvement in the Boston Public Schools, the evaluation of The After-School Corporation, and the evaluation of the New Century High Schools initiative in New York City. Ms. Fabiano received her M.P.P. from Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.    

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