Youth Program Quality Assessment

So more than a decade ago now, when I was the coordinator of a 21st Century CLC at a middle school, I made a giant poster of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and hung it up so it was the first thing you saw when you walked into my office.  

At the time, it felt like an act of subversion and confrontation- an intentional articulation of what youth need to find "success" in a school where the dominant culture was to ignore obvious needs in favor of a transactional, racist and at times violently punitive learning environment.  For me, displaying the Maslow framework so prominently was a way of silently screaming about the systemic neglect I observed, and its resulting harm. It also affirmed the work we were doing after school, serving as evidence that what many perceived as my loosey-goosey after school pedagogy was, in fact, an actual thing- backed by science, genuine, bona fide, legitimized. 

In reflection, I ask myself: why did I feel this way? It wasn't all that radical. Maslow is old school- kinda problematic in its simplicity.  But I clung to it, as did I clung to the Youth Program Quality Assessment tool, that was used, in part, to measure the efficacy of all 21st Century programs in the state. 

I suppose it was a matter of relativity. Maslow, the YPQA  are wholistic frameworks, which makes more sense to me than traditional education never did.  And I do- I mean- at the time, I did attribute some of the core strategies of my practice to these frameworks, things that for me are automatic and unthinking- like giving explicit feedback or greeting every kid by name or asking open-ended questions. 

In the years since, for all my initial, formative fidelity to Maslow and the YPQA, I've found myself modifying these frameworks: a rewording here, some condensing there. I began cutting out entire sections of the YPQA- because it was assessing factors that were systemic- out of the hands of the program, or it evaluated something that was irrelevant to the structure or nature of the programming itself.  The more critically I engaged with my work, and the more I fell into positions of leading the work, the more I saw its missing pieces. 

And now I've landed squarely at the point where I resent the idea of most program assessment. It's a form of capitulation to neoliberal education reform measures-the capitalistic pressures of the charity industrial complex.  

For me, the real takeaway from the quantification of learning is schools is the narrative that schools continue to fail our students. Whether that's true or not, year after year after year, and  new test after new test, we inevitably all read dire headlines about the failure of our poor, black and brown students to meet proficiency standards on these racist, classist standardized assessments.  

But in our programs, our kids are thriving, doing incredible, brilliant, critical things in authentic, deeply meaningful ways. And not because they have to be there. Because they want to be there.  How do you measure that? How do you enumerate the unquantifiable? How can you measure the impact of a loving relationship? The support of a community? The space to experiment? The freedom to play?

As youth workers, we know that's where the true value of our work lies, and it continues to be extremely frustrating that as under-resourced and under valued as our field is, we are held to a far higher standard of growth and impact than adjacent fields. 

We should be the schools.