The College Fix

A troubling piece by Mark Dynarski at The Brookings Institution details how, after $1.2 billion in spending, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) program simply … doesn’t work.

Created by the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act, spending skyrocketed from an initial $40 million in 1998 to $1 billion a mere four years later.

In 1999 the Department of Education commissioned a study of the program’s effectiveness; the results were dismal:

The evaluation collected data on a wide range of outcomes including grades, test scores, attendance, and behavior.

Ultimately, the evaluation reported on how the program affected outcomes. In a series of reports released between 2003 and 2005 (here, here, and here), the answers emerged: the program didn’t affect student outcomes. Except for student behavior, which got worse. And small samples were not an issue explaining why findings were insignificant. The national evaluation included about 2,300 elementary school students and 4,400 middle school students. The results were insignificant because the estimates of program effects hovered around zero.

Faced with these results, the G.W. Bush administration proposed $400 million in cuts to the program. However, as is often the case with such education-oriented spending, opponents of the cuts protested, and the result was “more than a billion dollars each year” allocated for the CCLC.

Dynarski points out that other research has failed to refute the 1999 study’s findings.

Some studies are more optimistic — like this which reported “A statewide evaluation of South Carolina’s 21st CCLC programs found that 79 percent of students believed that the program had improved their academic skills.”

But, “[a]sking students what they think happened to them hardly is a scientific basis for measuring program effects. There’s a good reason why a new drug for, say, reducing blood pressure, would not be approved simply because patients reported that they felt their blood pressure was lower. Studies need to undertake objective measurements of real outcomes,” Dynarski responds.

Read the full article.

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