The After-School Corporation reports that the organization will serve as an education adviser to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS on a project to improve young children’s reading and math skills. CPB and PBS received a five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s office of innovation and improvement for the project, which will focus on children ages 2 through 8. Also serving as advisers will be the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems and the National Summer Learning Assocation, among others.
There’s other interesting news over at the TASC website this week. First off, take a look at this video interview of Pedro Noguera, the executive director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education. Noguera, who is also a professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, speaks about extended learning time.
To do it well, he says, schools need to work differently in that extra time, to consider different approaches to structure and content than they use during the regular school day.
Pedro Noguera on Expanded Learning Time: Deeper Student Engagement from The After-School Corporation on Vimeo.
And, speaking of the National Summer Learning Association, the group’s executive director, Ron Fairchild, has a piece on the Huffington Post about the recent “Hours of Opportunity” report from the RAND Corp. The study, which was funded by the Wallace Foundation, talks about the strengths of citywide after-school systems that draw on the cooperative work of government, schools, and community-based organizations. He urges the public to continue support for such programs.
“The study includes an important cautionary note,” Fairchild writes. “These systems are hard to build and, once created, they are fragile. If the funding isn’t there—along with the drive to keep systems going amid the changing priorities of urban leadership—out-of-school-time learning might again become fragmented and uneven in these communities.”