Oddly enough, on the same day that the Economic Policy Institute and friends release this manifesto recommending that we "pay more attention to the time students spend out of school" (see Mike's post for more), IES releases a report evaluating two after-school programs. One of these programs was an adaptation of Success for All's existing school-day reading program which was modified for an after-school setting (called Adventure Island). The primary research question addressed in the random assignment study was "Does the enhanced after-school instruction improve math or reading proficiency over what students would achieve in regular after-school programs, as measured by test scores?"
Success for All's after school program provided students with 20 percent more hours of reading instruction over the school year, compared with students in the regular after-school program--yet students in the "enhanced" program did not experience statistically significant impacts on their performance on the SAT 10 reading tests, nor on other measures such as student engagement, behavior, or homework completion. Although there were a couple implementation blips (e.g., pacing), the report finds that overall Adventure Island was implemented as intended.
All in all, not terribly good news for this after-school offspring, whose in-school parent was found by the What Works Clearinghouse to have "potentially positive effects on alphabetics and general reading achievement." One wonders what happened in the after-school translation.
