$1.2 Billion was not spent well.

Brookings reports.

The $1.2 billion afterschool program that doesn’t work

As Tom Kane recently wrote in this forum, we should be investing more in research on education if we want to see more progress in education. We want education to embrace positive findings emerging from research. This logic also implies that education should move away from negative or null findings, when evidence shows that a program or policy does not work. But the history of federal afterschool programs suggests that a program that was funded on its potential can continue to be funded based on a kind of wishful thinking in which evidence is viewed through rose-colored glasses. How much evidence or what kind of evidence is needed to offset wishful thinking is a question worth considering.

Afterschool programs, or out-of-school time programs, burst into view in the late 1990s. The federal government—flush with budget surpluses of hundreds of billions—began spending more on the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) program. The program was created by the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act and had languished as an obscure provision to promote schools as community resources. Initially, the program received no appropriation, until Congress appropriated $40 million for it in 1998.

Spending exploded after the program pivoted to support afterschool programs. By 2002, the program’s appropriation was $1 billion. For a federal program to grow from $40 million to $1 billion in a few years happens rarely. The agency overseeing the program, the U.S. Department of Education, partnered with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to underwrite conferences and technical assistance for program providers, pumping millions more into the program.