🎶 Summertime, and the city’s steamy…

But that’s not stopping thousands of 14-24 year olds from participating in the District’s 2017 Marion S. Barry Summer Youth Employment Program.

Summer jobs have been a hot topic on the national scene this year, as research shows that they are in sharp decline. According to a recent piece in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson, “In the summer of 1978, 60 percent of teens were working or looking for work. Last summer, just 35 percent were.” Thompson quickly debunks a knee-jerk explanation: “kids are lazier these days!” In fact, data shows the number of youth in the US who are disconnected from education, employment or training has remained remarkably flat—meaning through one or more of these activities, youth are keeping busy. More likely (and obvious to those familiar with youth development) is a confluence of factors including increasing competition for entry-level and lower-skill work, greater pressure for youth to utilize summer months to get ahead or keep pace in their studies, the heavy reliance on unpaid internships for early work experience, and a national decline in federally funded summer jobs.

Youth Summer Jobs Programs: Aligning Ends and Means

This week we’re bringing you a guest post from Martha Ross, a fellow at the Brooking Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. Her newest paper Youth Summer Jobs Programs: Aligning Ends and Means, which she co-authors with Richard Kazis, takes an important look at the intentions and outcomes of summer youth employment programs from a national perspective. Read on for highlights of their work!

Summer jobs programs for youth have experienced an upsurge of investment since the 2007-2009 recession and the associated spikes in unemployment among young people. The well-documented drop in teen and young adult employment rates has raised concerns that it is becoming more difficult for young people to find pathways into the labor market, particularly for African-American and Latino teens living in neighborhoods with fewer job opportunities. Summer jobs programs offer a paycheck, employment experiences, and other organized activities in the service of multiple goals: increasing participants’ income, developing young people’s skills and networks to improve their job prospects, and offering constructive activities to promote positive behavior. The District of Columbia is one of a handful of jurisdictions that retained their summer jobs programs after the loss of dedicated federal funding in the late 1990s with the passage of the Workforce Investment Act.

Summer jobs programs are often one of the most high-profile youth initiatives of a given jurisdiction.  They typically last about six weeks and provide work opportunities to teens and young adults who otherwise might struggle to find jobs. Recent research finds that summer jobs programs have positive effects: reducing violence, incarceration, and mortality and improving academic outcomes.

But a strong program does not automatically follow from good intentions. Program design and implementation carry the day and determine the results. Although the research is encouraging, it is not robust enough to support generalized statements about program effectiveness, and it has not yet conclusively linked summer jobs programs to improved employment outcomes.

Summer jobs programs are complex endeavors to design and deliver within a very compressed time frame. No matter how dedicated the organization and staff operating the program, the demands of recruiting, assessing, placing, monitoring, and paying so many young people at one time are significant. In the absence of agreed-upon standards and best practices, quality is likely to vary considerably—both between cities and within a city, depending on the worksite or partner organization helping to run the program.

In a new paper, Youth Summer Jobs Programs: Aligning Ends and Means, my co-author Richard and Kazis and I assert that we need better answers to some fundamental questions: how much should we reasonably expect from a summer jobs program? For whom are the impacts the greatest? What are the critical program elements to improve a young person’s skills and job prospects?

Based on interviews and a scan of the literature, we identified a core set of practices that support high-quality programs, divided into two categories.

Program design

• Recruiting employers and worksites and sustaining their participation to provide the maximum number of job opportunities.
• Matching young people with age- and skill-appropriate opportunities, differentiating by age, work readiness, and youth interests so that no one goes to a workplace unprepared to succeed.

• Preparing young people to succeed and learn new skills by providing training and professional development on work readiness and other topics, including financial capability.

• Supporting youth and supervisors to maximize learning and development by structuring the job placement and monitoring progress over the summer to address problems that arise and provide guidance to supervisors on working with young people.

• Connecting the summer program to other educational, employment, and youth development services so that the summer program both feeds into and draws from other community resources.

Capacity and infrastructure

• Ensuring sufficient staff capacity and capability to deliver critical program elements at a high level of quality, executing with clear roles, sufficient staff training, and coordination across partner organizations.

• Deploying information technologies to improve program management and communication among partners and participants, including information management systems to streamline enrollment and job matching and to strengthen tracking and evaluation.

• Simplifying coordination and strengthening training through partnership management tools, such as sample job descriptions and assessment tools that help structure the work experience and support youth and worksite supervisors.

We concluded that it is harder than most people think to run a high-quality summer youth employment program and to measure progress towards the goal of helping young people improve their skills and job prospects. We also concluded that it is both easy and unwise to expect too much of a summer jobs program, especially for the most vulnerable and unprepared young people, who typically need more intensive and longer-term services. Ideally, the current wave of energy and investments in summer jobs programs around the country will inspire and empower cities to step back from the day-to-day management of a summer jobs program and assess their program design and organizational capacity against the ultimate goal:  helping young people succeed in their communities and in the workplace.

Creating Career Pathways for DC Youth

Guest blogger Martha Ross is a fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program whose work focuses on education, training, and the labor market. 

This week, Martha highlights recommendations from a recently released report “Improving Youth Programs and Outcomes in Washington, D.C.”.

No one is satisfied with the educational and employment outcomes of District youth, nor should they be. Consider a few data points: 

• Unemployment rates skyrocketed during the recession and have yet to recover, disproportionately affecting younger workers. In 2013, unemployment among teens aged 16-19 in the District stood at 34%. Among young adults aged 20-24 it was 12.3%, and among the total population it was 8.6%. 

• Only about two-thirds of public high school students graduate in four years. 

• Unacceptably large numbers of low-income young people with lower levels of education—about 8,300, or 9% of all young people aged 16 to 24—are “disconnected,” meaning they are neither in school nor employed. 

So what should we do? In a recent report I co-authored with Mala B. Thakur, Improving Youth Programs and Outcomes in Washington, D.C., I outline two areas for action. 

1.) Programs serving youth should use data to measure their progress towards reaching their goals.

This practice would help young people increase their skills, educational credentials, and employment outcomes.  This sounds almost laughably commonsensical but it’s harder to do than it sounds.  Most organizations serving youth are well aware of the power of data, but on any given day, data-related tasks are vulnerable to being outranked by more immediate priorities. Organizations can find it difficult to direct resources toward data and evaluation, since it usually directly competes with service delivery. 

One concrete step would be for funders to support a community of practice for service providers to improve their use of data for learning, self-evaluation, and ongoing improvement.  A community of practice is a learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular topic.  In this case, members would be helping each other “get better at getting better.” 

2.) Use a career pathways framework to build a more coherent youth employment system. 

A career pathway provides progressive levels of education, training, and support services to prepare people for employment and career advancement. As defined by the Center for Law and Social Policy, career pathways incorporate three features: a) multiple entry points, both for the well-prepared and those with limited skills, b) well-connected education, training, and support services within specific occupational or industry-based career opportunities, and c) multiple exit points at successively higher levels of skills or more senior employment opportunities.

This recommendation focuses on improving how different organizations (adult education, K-12, community college, nonprofits) interact with each other to provide a structured sequence of education, training and other services. That’s why a task force or collaborative effort led by such entities as RAISE DC, the Workforce Investment Council, and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education could be the appropriate vehicle to lead this effort.

Essential Features of a Career Pathway System

Source:  CLASP, “Shared Vision, Strong Systems:  The Alliance for Quality Career Pathways Framework Version 1.0” (2014)

In conclusion:  The status quo demands a continuous and targeted focus on quality improvement and system-building.  Too few young people in DC meet key educational and employment milestones in the transition to adulthood. We can do better.

DCAYA would like to thank Martha Ross for contributing to our weekly blog, as well as her valuable research towards improving outcomes for District youth.

You can read more local research authored by Martha Ross at www.brookings.edu, such as “Connecting to Opportunity: Access to Jobs via Transit in Washington, D.C. Region” and “Strengthening Educational and Career Pathways for D.C. Youth”. 

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