HFRP Associate Director Tapped to Testify at House Hearing

Priscilla Little, associate director of the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) at HGSE, was one of four witnesses invited to testify at the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education hearing, After School Programs: How the Bush Administration's Budget Impacts Children and Families, for the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor on March 11.

The hearing, chaired by U.S. Representative Dale Kildee (D-MI), examined the potential effects of President Bush's plan to slash $281 million — 26 percent — of funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC), a federally supported afterschool program that provides services to more than 1.5 million children and their families.

"Afterschool programs are a critical component of children's education and development and, in part thanks to the 21st CCLC grants program, we have a good solid evidence base to support this claim," Little testified.

For more than 10 years, Little has tracked the 21st CCLC grants program. Additionally, her work at HFRP has focused on building successful out-of-school-time initiatives and effective policies to support children's learning. HFRP's mission in out-of-school-time is to promote the strategic use of information to improve the quality, accessibility, and sustainability of out of school time programs across the nation. This work includes compiling the only national database of out-of-school-time evaluations and research studies, and disseminating accessible publications to help policymakers and practitioners understand what these studies tell us about effective programming.

In her testimony, Little referred to studies that demonstrate how quality afterschool programs improve academic, social, and emotional outcomes, especially for low-income children. "It is important to note that the common thread among all these studies is not just that the programs intentionally tried to improve academic performance and therefore offered academic support, but that they combined it with other enrichment activities to achieve positive academic outcomes," she said.

Little also noted that in order to succeed in a competitive global economy, young people must "be equipped with a set of skills that goes beyond the three R's... They need to become effective communicators, know how to develop and sustain relationships, solve problems, and have a strong sense of self. [The research offers] solid evidence that 21st CCLC and other after school programs can support a range" of these desirable behavioral outcomes.

Little's latest publication is an issue brief titled Afterschool Programs in the 21st Century: Their Potential and What it Takes to Achieve It. The brief draws on seminal research and evaluation studies to address the evolving role of afterschool.