After-school activity
After-school activities, also known as after-school programs or after-school care, started in the early 1900s mainly just as supervision of students after the final school bell. Today, after-school programs do much more. There is a focus on helping students with school work but can be beneficial to students in other ways. An after-school program, today, will not limit its focus on academics but with a holistic sense of helping the student population. An after-school activity is any organized program that youth or adult learner voluntary can participate in outside of the traditional school day. Some programs are run by a primary or secondary school, while others are run by externally funded non-profit or commercial organizations. After-school youth programs can occur inside a school building or elsewhere in the community, for instance at a community center, church, library, or park. After-school activities are a cornerstone of concerted cultivation, which is a style of parenting that emphasizes children gaining leadership experience and social skills through participating in organized activities. Such children are believed by proponents to be more successful in later life, while others consider too many activities to indicate overparenting. While some research has shown that structured after-school programs can lead to better test scores, improved homework completion, and higher grades, further research has questioned the effectiveness of after-school programs at improving youth outcomes such as externalizing behavior and school attendance. Additionally, certain activities or programs have made strides in closing the achievement gap, or the gap in academic performance between white students and students of color as measured by standardized tests. Though the existence of after-school activities is relatively universal, different countries implement after-school activities differently, causing after-school activities to vary on a global scale.
History
After World War II, the number of single parent families in the United States increased as women began to participate in the labor force. Traditional family roles and structure were tremendously altered as women began to serve as major financial contributors, increasing the average percentage of employed women from 38 percent in 1955 to 78 percent by 2004. Many women worked jobs with long hours with no one available to pick up children from school at the appropriate time. After-school programs, then, had the significant function of serving as a place where children could receive safe adult supervision after school hours, allowing parents to continue working without the worry of their child’s safety or well-being.During the World War, after-school programs served as a solution to the decline in child labor and offered supervision for families active in the working economy. The end of the war repurposed after-school activities as opportunities for developing children to receive interactive care that promoted child health and well-being that may not have been received at home. As children began to work fewer or no hours after school, they could focus more on education and participating in school, resulting in a "new outlook on childhood" that emphasized the importance of well-rounded care. A large factor contributing to the continuation and expansion of after-school activities involved growing concerns that children without this source of extra care were at an increased risk of developing social and academic problems because they would utilize learned behaviors of rejecting opportunities before they could be rejected themselves.
Case countries
United Kingdom
After-school activities in Britain are typically organised commercially and paid for by parents. Many children attend several a week, and occasionally even more than one per day. Similar activities also occur at weekends.There is typically less focus on the managed "enrichment" than in the US, beyond the basic choice of activity; for example football is physically active and develops teamwork.
United States
After school programs are common in the United States. The oldest after school program in the country, the Knickerbocker Greys, was established in 1881 and is located in New York City.In Texas, a statewide program exists for creating after-school programs: Texas Afterschool Centers on Education, or Texas ACE. Texas ACE is a part of the Texas Education Agency, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which sponsors afterschool enrichment programs at under-resourced schools in the U.S.
In California, after-school programming at the secondary level is funded primarily with program grants. These grants stipulate programs must include academic, enrichment, and health and nutrition components. The after-school programs at California's elementary schools are predominantly funded with grants mandated when voters statewide approved California's Proposition 49. These grants provide for much of what the ASSETS grants provide at the secondary level, though there is an added family literacy component. Throughout Southern California, non-profit providers work in partnership with school districts to provide after-school programs for k-12 students. Typically school districts apply for the grants to fund the local after-school programs. Then districts either elect to manage those program internally or outsource management to a Community-based organization, Non-governmental organization or other local non-profit provider. is a district run and managed after-school program offered to students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. THINK Together, California's largest non-profit provider, contracts with approximately 20 Southern California school district partners to run and manage academically oriented after-school programs at approximately 200 school sites located across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties.
Benefits of after-school activities
Positive use of time
Some working parents wish for their children to be more supervised during after-school hours, which Mahoney, Larson, and Eccles's 2005 study discovered to be a leading reason for student enrollment in structured after-school programs. Likewise, in a 2010 article, scholars Wu and Van Egeren found that some parents enroll their students in after-school programs in order to give them a supervised, safe place to spend time. Many after-school activities take place in the afternoons of school days, on the weekends, or during the summer, thereby helping working parents with childcare. While some after-school programs serve as a day-care facility for young children, other programs specifically target adolescents in middle and high schools—providing opportunities for children of all ages.Some proponents of these programs argue that if left unsupervised, children and adolescents may fall into undesirable activities such as sexual promiscuity, substance abuse, or gang-affiliated activity. Since adolescents are old enough to be left unsupervised, they have a higher risk of engaging in criminal behavior than young children do, which may increase the perceived need for constructive after-school programs, as Cook, Godfredson, and Na argue in their 2010 article in the journal Crime and Justice. In the United States, interest in utilizing after-school programs for delinquency-prevention increased dramatically after research found that juvenile arrest rates peak between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. on school days. By keeping students involved in school related activities, it lessens the chance for them to get involved in criminal activity or abuse drugs and alcohol. Involvement with after-school programs has led to students obtaining a more negative view on drugs. A study of positive outcomes from after-school program involvement shows that there are lower uses of drugs such as "alcohol, marijuana, and other drug use" after being involved with an after-school program.
Academic growth
Studies show that afterschool programs are beneficial for both children and adolescents. A 1994 long-term study by Posner and Vandell found that children in structured, academic afterschool programs had increased academic achievement when compared to their peers. Researchers chose a pool of children who had taken part in some sort of after-school program and another pool of children who did not take part in a formal after-school program as a control group. They gave assessments to the children, their parents, and their teachers in order to determine the children's levels of academic achievement, and the results showed that students who had taken part in a structured after-school program were more likely to have better grades and to perform higher in math and reading tests than those who had not taken part in an after-school program. Similarly, a 2010 study by Durlak, Weissberg, and Pachan showed that both children and adolescents experienced significant academic gains by taking part in afterschool programs.Several other studies have found that after-school academic tutoring or homework assistance may not result in an improvement in academic performance, but, rather, prevent a decline in performance that is evidenced by many at-risk youth. Morrison et al. studied 350 at-risk students, half of whom participated in an after-school program that provided homework assistance, tutoring, and cultural enrichment activities. They found after 1 year that students in the program maintained their initial levels of school bonding and teacher ratings of student behavior, while a matched cohort of students who did not participate in the program showed decreases on these measures over the same period of time. Tucker et al. evaluated an afterschool tutoring program serving low-income African American students. After 2 years, participants did not show significant increases in grades, but students who were not in the program showed a significant grade decrease. Together, these studies indicate that after-school academic support may play a protective role by helping to prevent a loss of school engagement even if it doesn't result in higher levels of functioning.
Minority, low income, urban settings, "at-risk", and other negative connotations labeling youth's hinder academic achievements. Effective after-school programs can try to bridge the gap between education achievement and the negatively-labeled student.
In an article written by Barton J.Hirsh, he highlights studies that show children who participate in after-school programs show improvements in both their academic performance and personality development. Additionally, they learn problem solving skills and practice their artistic abilities.