Chapter 7: From Quantity to Quality: Lessons Learned From an Ongoing Statewide Initiative

Since 2013, the K–12 Student Success: Out-of-School Time Initiative has supported over 50 community organizations and schools to expand and improve out-of-school (OST) programming for middle school students throughout Oregon. Along the way, we—the team managing, supporting, and evaluating the initiative—have learned a lot about what it takes to support intensive efforts to measure and bolster OST program quality. In this chapter, we reflect together on how the initiative has evolved as a result of what we’ve learned thus far. We also discuss some of our ongoing challenges related to measuring and using data about program quality and share our advice for others who want to support program quality improvement for OST programs.