The Children's Agenda for California
Defining the goals of
The Children's Movement
Goal 4:
Strengthening the state’s afterschool infrastructure and building summer programs to deliver high-quality expanded learning opportunities and to support the preparation of future teachers.
Specific policy components to consider:
- Protecting afterschool program funding.
State policymakers should continue to protect funding for afterschool programs in California. These programs provide expanded learning opportunities for children, while simultaneously keeping them safe and allowing their parents to work. - Promoting high-quality afterschool programs as part of education reform.
California has an opportunity to promote afterschool programs as a critical piece of education reform. High-quality afterschool programs offer students hands-on, inquiry-based and collaborative learning experiences, and connect the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom with real-world applications. The state should implement policies that encourage the meaningful integration of afterschool staff in school improvement planning, professional development and data reflection, as well as support the implementation of complementary curriculum and instructional strategies between the traditional school day and afterschool programs. - Incorporating afterschool data.
California has invested in building the largest public afterschool infrastructure in the nation, which provides over 300,000 children with safe, enriching learning environments between the hours of 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. Currently, afterschool grantees are required to submit data on their programs, but this data is not linked to the state’s student information system. This data must be linked in the near term to CALPADS and ultimately be included in the new data system. - Enhancing summer learning and enrichment opportunities.
Research suggests that more than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income students can be explained by unequal access to enriching summer activities. As such, policymakers should develop incentives for local communities to build on their existing state- and federally-funded afterschool programs to provide high-quality summer learning and enrichment opportunities. - Supporting an effective teacher pipeline.
To address the impending teacher shortage, the state should scale effective teacher pipeline models that foster collaboration among community colleges, universities, local education agencies, community-based organizations and afterschool providers. These models would be especially useful in attracting teachers to high-need communities and high-demand subjects such as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
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