After School Programs Research Prospectus
After school programs are important aspects of education. Some students attend them for help with academics. Others in an effort to have productive activities in which to engage after school while their parents may be working. The goals of after-school programs (ASPs) are to boost the morale of students, provide inclusivity, and help with academic success for students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and/or minority population, studies vary on how successful ASPs are at achieving these objectives. More rigorous standards should be applied to the development and implementation of ASPs to ensure the success of students of varying ethnicities. For example, some non-English speaking ASP participants are placed in English-only programs that have proven not to be successful for students who do not understand English. Another example is that students often differ culturally and the programs are designed with a “model student” in mind. That model student may not match the reality for students from some cultures. That leads one to question whether after-school enrichment programs help students of different ethnicities perform better. One such program, the Oakland Tech After School Program. African American students make up a significant proportion of Oakland Techs multicultural student population and many attend the ASPs offered at the school. However, recent studies have shown that 66% of African Americans scored below standard in mathematics, and 36% of African Americans scored below standard in English. Oakland Tech had one of the lowest percentages of USC/UC Credits completed at 44.9%. This makes one wonder why this is the case if ASPs are promoted as being useful especially for African American students who are disproportionately the students who attend ASPs. That leads to the research question: Does participation in the Oakland Tech After School Program boost academic success for Black/African American students?
Literature Review
ASPs are supposed to be for students who struggle in school or in society. ASPs help the students to improve their school work, learn to interact with others, and prevent them from falling into bad influences or having to be home alone after school. These are all objectives of ASPs that could benefit most students; however, according to Kathryn Hynes and Felicia Sanders of Journal of Negro Education, African American students are disproportionately enrolled in ASPs (Hynes and Sanders 464). When these researchers compared characteristics of white students and African American students enrolled in ASPs such as living in a single-parent household, living in urban areas, and families that use child care subsidies, there was no explanation provided for the race differences and the gap between the use of ASPs and white and African American students is getting larger (Hynes and Sanders 464). Other researchers approach ASPs from another angle: they study what works with African American students.
Toks Fashola and Robert Cooper of the Journal of Negro Education agree that there are few successful ASPs for African American students. They found four types of ASPs that demonstrate varying efforts to be successful. For example, programs that are intended to increase academic performance, the most successful ones for African Americans are those that have greater structure, provide a link to the school curriculum, have well-qualified and well-trained staffs, and provide tutoring. All ASPs, according to Fashola and Cooper, are better if they include consistency, active community involvement, and well-trained staff and volunteers who respond to the needs of the participants (Fashola and Cooper 135). African American and black students are often relegated to programs that are aimed at increasing their success, but they are often not assigned to classes that may challenge them.
One way to try to understand the experience of African American and black students is to look at their strategies for academic success. Carla O’Connor, et al. of the American Educational Research Journal explains that currently black and African American students exist under “second-generation segregation.” That is that which “occurs when schools desegregated at the building level are resegregated by academic programs to constitute a racially stratified academic hierarchy” (O’Connor, Mueller and Lewis 1232). In this version of segregation, non-Asian minorities are disproportionately tracked into the less challenging courses rather into college track courses. Those minorities are underrepresented in higher level (college track) courses (O’Connor, Mueller and Lewis 1233). This results in an unfair disadvantage for these students when it comes their plans for after they graduate from high school. It also parallels the disproportionate numbers of black and African American students in ASPs that are aimed at correcting these types of disparities and helping minority students perform better academically. It begs the question of whether ASPs actually achieve their objectives or not, and if they do, why are non-Asian minorities still tracked into the lower level courses.
Chandra Muller, et al. of the Teachers College Record found similar results in their study on African American and Latino students in integrated public schools. Some such schools do offer equal educational opportunities to their students, but not all. If the opportunities are equitable for all students, then all minority groups are represented in the higher level classrooms. These researchers used the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study (AHAA) and its partner study, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) from 1994-1995 to determine the variance of inequality across integrated high schools in the United States. The data revealed that African American and Latino students were underrepresented in advanced courses, but that underrepresentation is greater in some schools than in others. Muller, et al. do not feel that the inequality is related to issues of social class or academic preparation. What their study did show was that because of underrepresentation in advanced courses, African American and Latino students had lower GPAs and lower success rates. These researchers feel it is a product of the way students are assigned to courses by the institution itself, which again indicates racial bias (Muller, Riegle-Crumb and Schiller 12).
The evidence from O’Connor et al. and Muller et al. cited above of unfair assignment and internal segregation in integrated schools may provide an insight into why African Americans are so disproportionately assigned to ASPs and why the ASPs are not as successful as they were once purported to be. If the presumption is that the student will not do well before the student has a chance to prove him- or herself, then there is predetermined bias and it is often at an institutional level.
Methodology
To carry out the planned research, observations would be made at the Oakland Tech ASP. A survey of what types of programs are offered would be done noting the requirements for each program. The education, training and socioeconomic backgrounds of the teachers would also be researched. The styles of engagement and learning structures and environments would also be investigated. When difficult circumstances arise, the way they are resolved in regard to race, family issues, outside factors and peer to pear interaction would be looked at also. Finally, the support system for the Oakland Technical ASPs participants who struggle economically with food and other resources would be studied.
Analysis
Besides the qualitative analysis of the information gleaned from the research listed above, an analysis of the number of African American/black students are enrolled in the ASPs at Oakland Technical. Some of the data would be used to determine if there is overlap or if students are enrolled in multiple programs through the ASP. The programs that enroll the most African American or black students would also be noted.
The research would also follow ten students, five of whom were African American or black and five who are not. The behavior, attentiveness and interaction with others of all ten students would be observed. The programs they take part in and the number of days per week they attend the ASPs would also be noted. The study group students would also be interviewed with questions including what they do after school if they do not attend an ASP, when they began attending, why they chose to participate, what they like/dislike about the ASPs, what benefits they derive from the ASP, do they feel the ASPs help them to succeed, do they feel welcome at Oakland Tech, and what they want to do after high school. Other sources of data that would be analyzed include the academic records of those who involved in the study so that their academic development could be charted.
Conclusion
The hope is that the research will prove they hypothesis that students enrolled in Oakland Tech ASPs will help them to improve academically and achieve greater success to be true. However, it seems as if ASPs are another way of segregating African American and Latino students once again. They are often not offered the higher level courses early in their high school careers and are, therefore, not eligible for college track courses later. In order to try to achieve GPAs that will provide them opportunities after high school, African American students enroll in ASPs.
This study provides an opportunity to offer one explanation why some minority students disproportionately seek out ASPs so that they can try to regain some of the lost opportunities when they are not assigned to higher level courses that will challenge them. It will also hopefully reveal the glaring bias in the policies across the country that place African American students in lower level classes automatically demonstrating racial bias. Hopefully, the students involved in a study at Oakland Tech would be able to find the missed opportunities in one or more of the ASPs offered.
Works Cited
Fashola, Olatokunbo ("Toks") and Robert Cooper. "Developing the Academic Talents of African American Students during the Non-School Hours: Four Exemplary Programs." Journal of Negro Education 68.2 (1999): 130-137. JSTOR. 3 December 2019. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/2... >.
Hynes, Kathryn and Felicia Sanders. "Diverging Experiences during Out-of-School Time: The Race Gap in Exposure to AfterSchool Programs." Journal of Negro Education 80.4 (2011): 464-476. JSTOR. 3 December 2019. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/4... >.
Muller, C, et al. "Race and Academic Achievement in Racially Diverse High Schools: Opportunity and Stratification." Teachers College Record 112.4 (2010): 1-23. PMC. 4 December 2019. < https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... >.
O’Connor, Carla, et al. "Being” Black and strategizing for excellence in a racially stratified academic hierarchy." American Educational Research Journal 48.6 (2011): 1232-1257. Google Scholar. 3 December 2019. < https://s3.amazonaws.com/acade... >.
