Education and Youth Development
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In the United States, there is only one youth opportunity program that is available to all children and supported with public resources: kindergarten through 12th grade schooling. School is the one place where children—especially those who are poor—have access to the services they need to become successful citizens, family members, and workers. Without regular school attendance, Baltimore’s children are unlikely to stay on the path to a productive life.
Many youth in Baltimore live in poverty and have far fewer opportunities than their more advantaged peers. Often, their homes lack parental support and neighborhood conditions make even the physical journey to school dangerous. For those who make the trip to school, they are many times met with limited enriching educational opportunities, inadequately trained teachers, and a rigid curriculum. School discipline policies that over-use suspensions and expulsions as disciplinary tools push children out of school where support and opportunities are even more scarce. As a result, suspended and expelled youth are more likely to drop out or enter the juvenile justice system.
Unless children’s school experiences include capable teachers, engaging schools, and a wide array of opportunities for out-of-school learning, it is unlikely that they will be provided with skills—academic and social—to ensure their productive futures.
Through its program work, OSI-Baltimore’s Education and Youth Development Program focuses on getting kids to school, keeping them engaged during the day, reconnecting those students who may have lost their way, and expanding learning opportunities after hours and during the summer to create a comprehensive learning environment that doesn’t end when the concluding school bell rings.
Baltimore schools cost close to one billion dollars annually. It is imperative that our city’s largest public expenditure is put to the greatest use to benefit the entire community.
To begin to address these needs, OSI-Baltimore’s Education and Youth Development Program has the following funding priorities:
School Reform
For poor children, high-quality instruction is one of the most significant contributors to student achievement. Like other school districts in urban areas, Baltimore City’s Public School System (BCPSS) faces a myriad of challenges to provide every student with a sound education.
Through our strong partnership with BCPSS, we concentrate our efforts on the system’s priorities and use our expertise to pinpoint critical issues, and help to build initiatives to tackle the problems—such as inadequately trained teachers, crowded classrooms, low literacy rates, even lower graduation rates, and inefficient administrative procedures—that block student success.
To improve Baltimore public schools and produce more college-bound graduates, OSI has worked with city agencies and other funding partners to establish a core of six innovation high schools, which provide smaller, theme-oriented educational environments. Thus far, these schools have reported better student performance which has led to the developing and opening of additional facilities.
Improving School Attendance
One of the single most stunning statistics that illuminates why Baltimore is unsuccessful in educating its students is this: Every year, 20,000 students are repeatedly absent from class. With so many missing students, teachers become frustrated and struggle to follow lesson plans, assign homework, and assess student progress. And absent students fall behind. The OSI-Baltimore Education and Youth Development Program believes that the key to increasing achievement in Baltimore is to slash the numbers of students who are suspended, truant or otherwise absent from class.
In Baltimore, suspension and expulsion are common responses to all types of behavioral problems, trivial and serious. But most suspensions are harmful and do not teach troubled students appropriate behavior. Instead, suspension excludes students from learning and other supports, often leaving them unsupervised, and more likely to be involved in drugs or crime or a violent crime victim.
Student absence can have similar effects. But unlike disciplinary practices that actively push students out, high rates of absence result when schools are not engaging, welcoming, and capable of meeting student needs. Students stay away when there are transportation, health and safety barriers to attendance and when the community buys into a belief that school doesn’t matter.
Alarmingly, neither the Baltimore community nor its schools have responded consistently and aggressively to stem the epidemic of student absences and school exclusions. The failure to do so has contributed mightily to the high rates of school failure, dropout, drug and juvenile justice involvement that plague our city.
The OSI-Baltimore Education and Youth Development Program has been a leader in working to keep children in school by identifying and addressing the root causes of high rates of suspension, expulsion, and absence in Baltimore. We regularly convene discussions and forums with educational leaders and advocates from Baltimore and experts from elsewhere to bring attention to these critical educational failures and their solutions. Program staff publish and widely circulate the central findings of research on these issues.
Additionally, we select organizations that are effective in improving school attendance and provide them with both funding and technical assistance. We also work with BCPSS to address school attendance and discipline. The OSI-Baltimore Education and Youth Development Program has been instrumental in initiating the revision of the BCPSS discipline code so that suspension and expulsion are truly last resort options.
After-School Programming
The time youth spend out of school is just as crucial to their development as the time they spend in school. High-quality out-of-school learning opportunities improve academic, social, physical, and emotional outcomes for youth—and provide the best drug prevention program by keeping youth engaged in positive programs.
The after-school hours, weekend days, and summer months should offer Baltimore’s youth the chance to continue learning, making friends, and finding their interests and skills. Instead, too many youth spend this time unsupervised, idle, or worst of all, engaged in dangerous, harmful activities.
In Baltimore, most adult parents need to work and that means that children need safe, supervised places to go and programs to attend if they are to avoid being on their own at home or in their communities. City children and youth thrive if they have programs that are small, intimate educational settings with positive role models and supervision, targeted and engaging instruction, enriching activities, and a safe place to socialize.
As one of the largest funders of Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign, the OSI-Baltimore Education and Youth Development Program continues to play a vital role in developing a city-wide network designed to make out-of-school-time safe, enriching, and educationally engaging for all children. In addition to financial support, OSI staff serve on related policy, evaluation and professional development boards, and help to connect Safe and Sound to key public agencies.
Through OSI, Safe and Sound partnered with BCPSS to design an after-school program model called BOOST (Baltimore’s Out of School Time Initiative) that keeps youth engaged for three hours after school, five days a week. BOOST programs are supported almost entirely by public funds and serve more than 20,000 Baltimore children. With recent OSI funding, the city has begun to develop programs specifically for older youth that offer paid work, academic help, high interest activities and social time—engaging programming that keeps our youth off the streets and involved with drugs and/or crime.
By providing financial support and technical assistance to key organizations dedicated to increasing out-of-school learning and by writing and speaking widely about the need for out-of-school time programs, the OSI-Baltimore Education and Youth Development Program has been a forerunner in the creation and expansion of out-of-school programming in Baltimore.
Summer Programming
One hundred years of research has shown that all children lose academic ground during the summer and that losses are greater for children from low-income families and high-poverty neighborhoods. New studies also show that malnutrition, obesity, social isolation and physical inactivity increase over the summer months when school is not in session. And, in neighborhoods where drugs are prevalent, crime is constant, and productive learning opportunities are few, many youth are in harm’s way during a time that many consider idyllic for children.
Studies show that summer learning loss is a significant contributor to the achievement gap between poor and non-poor students. While more affluent children have the resources to go to camp, travel, gain real-world job experience, or advance their education, poor children suffer from inadequate supervision, limited access to regular, healthy meals, and lack of enrichment activities. The limited summer programming that is available for low-income children is generally remedial. It doesn’t offer enriching, interesting opportunities that can help youth develop varied interests, skills and talents, get ahead in school, and expose them to new friends, adults and life options.
In addition to stemming the summer learning loss, researchers have found that summer programming helps to engage youth in school all year long. OSI-Baltimore is a pioneering proponent of expanded and enhanced summer activities for city children and youth. As a lead funder for the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University, the Education and Youth Development program provided resources to work with Baltimore City school officials to design summer programs, leverage additional funding, and train staff to serve thousands of public school children. OSI also provided financial and technical support to help the Center grow into a nationally recognized organization on summer learning.
