Category: 2006

Current TV, Al Gore’s experimental outlet for audience-created content, can be viewed only by cable customers paying premium prices for digital programming, the San Francisco Weekly reports. “We stay in touch with what our customers want, and right now I would say [Current] is definitely a niche channel,” said one cable company executive.
But some suspect the cable companies’ lukewarm reception is really payback for when Gore, as a U.S. senator, helped push an act that cost the cable industry millions of dollars by restricting how cable operators charge consumers.

“Seventy-six percent of schools without newspapers were urban or rural schools, those most likely to have high concentrations of poor students and students of color,” the Columbia Journalism Review reports. The divide was apparent at this year’s annual Fall National High School Journalism Convention, which brought together thousands of teens who work on school newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, literary journals, and yearbooks.

Continue reading The Haves and Have-Nots of High School Journalism

On January 31, when Time Warner youth media grantees convened in one of the multimedia giant’s glass-walled conference rooms, practitioners pondered one of the most persistent and challenging requests from funders—to provide proof that their programs work.
The conference was monitored by the Educational Development Center (EDC), which has been researching how youth media programs evaluate their impact. Youth media practitioners in attendance shared frustrations about the demands for evaluations (few would expect football coaches to provide such proof, pointed out one attendee), as well as practical tips for carrying them out.
Anthony Streit of EDC advised organizations to clearly identify the programs’ intended outcomes before designing evaluations. And just as young reporters can elicit the type of candid quotes from peers that often elude adult journalists, young people can also conduct insightful peer evaluations.

The demand for program evaluations can be frustrating (few would expect football coaches to provide them).

Directors who had previously worked with EDC to develop program evaluations concurred that the process was “complicated” and “time-consuming,” but ultimately worthwhile. “It’s really interesting when you start looking through this lens, and what it’s telling us about impact,” said one.
Another talked about forming reality-TV-inspired “Truth Booths,” where teens in her video workshop could privately tell the camera what they really thought about the program.
Because finding effective systems of evaluation—and, preferably, ones that appeal to funders—was still a trial-and-error process for most at the conference, it’s important to recognize that the broader youth work field has also grappled with this challenge. Practitioners can look to programs, conferences, and publications outside youth media, as well, for further ideas about demonstrating program effectiveness. Youth Today, for instance, has a regular column on program evaluation. The February issue alone features two articles on the subject.
One of these articles covers a recent conference hosted by the Partnership for After-School Education that sounds surprisingly similar to the Time Warner meeting. Participants there debated how to reconcile the need for accountability with the often murky and difficult-to-measure goals of youth work, like helping young people make better decisions. “Develop short- and long-term indicators to show that young people are on the right path,” as Jane Quinn summarized that conference’s overriding theme. “But resist the urge to abandon the values that undergird our work.”
An inspiring article from an earlier Youth Today issue profiles the Phoenix Academy of Los Angeles, a residential substance-abuse treatment program for teens, which partners with research teams for program evaluations. The collaborations, according to the article, “have yielded mutually beneficial gold-standard evaluations, boosted Phoenix Academy’s quality improvement plan and garnered good publicity—delivering a lot of evaluation bang for relatively few of the academy’s bucks.”
When I edited a magazine written by teens in foster care, I fantasized about this type of venture. I wanted to enlist a researcher to conduct a longitudinal study comparing a group of writers who participated in the magazine’s summer writing workshop to a group who applied but, at random, weren’t admitted. I imagined it would be kind of like the “Seven Up!” documentaries, which tracked down a group of British school kids every seven years. In my study, researchers would check in with the participants every year or so, looking for patterns among the two groups.
While this idea may be a bit far-fetched, learning about the Phoenix House collaboration makes partnering with researchers—who might even fund program studies—a feasible idea. And I’ve since learned that at least one youth media group has already accomplished this. Dr. Catherine Sanderson studied the audience of Sex, Etc., concluding in the Journal of Adolescent Research that young people who read the newsletter showed marked increases in responsible sexual attitudes.
It may be a long time before many programs have the means to conduct such rigorous research. For now, as we continue experimenting to find the right balance of surveys, studies, and youth-led evaluations, it’s worth borrowing ideas and inspiration from the outside, as well.

Continue reading Lifting the Burden of Proof

The following is a condensed version of an article that appeared in Youth Today.
It’s a common and much-complained-about paradox: How can nonprofit youth-serving agencies pay for the rigorous evaluations that funders require, when no one will provide enough money to carry out rigorous evaluations?
Psssst: A nonprofit in Los Angeles has figured out how to fund high-quality evaluations of its program while spending little of its own money.
The Phoenix Academy of Los Angeles is a 120-bed residential substance abuse treatment program for 13- to 17-year-olds, most of whom are placed by the Los Angeles juvenile courts. The academy is one of 11 operated by Phoenix House, one of the nation’s largest substance abuse treatment providers.
In lieu of hiring evaluators outright, Phoenix Academy has focused on parlaying its reputation, expertise and access to raw data into lucrative, symbiotic partnerships with research organizations like RAND Corporation that help the academy identify and secure evaluation funding.
Those partnerships have yielded mutually beneficial gold-standard evaluations, boosted Phoenix Academy’s quality improvement plan and garnered good publicity—delivering a lot of evaluation bang for relatively few of the academy’s bucks.

Getting in the Spotlight

It is a sign of this strategy’s success that although community-based substance abuse treatment for youth has been the focus of little scientific evaluation, Phoenix Academy crops up repeatedly in a handful of well-regarded research studies of adolescent substance abuse treatment.
Such studies, and their conclusions about Phoenix Academy, have been touted in press releases, posted on websites and published in scientific journals. That ultimately led to the designation of the academy as a model program by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
“The Phoenix Academy project [the AOP study] cost well over $1 million,” says Andrew Morral, director of RAND’s Safety and Justice program and an investigator on that and several other adolescent substance abuse treatment studies. “No program that I know of could afford to pay that.” The study was funded by a grant from SAMHSA.

How To

In interviews with Morral and Phoenix Academy Director Elizabeth Stanley-Salazar, several key themes emerged as guidelines for nonprofits seeking low-cost ways to fund evaluations through research partnerships:
Work with other organizations to increase your viability and visibility, even though it may not produce immediate results.
Agencies “should be working through collaborations, coalitions and associations to try to do some of this work,” Stanley-Salazar says. “Maybe do some peer review, some peer evaluations down on the ground.”
Working together in coalitions makes small programs more appealing, especially in terms of their ability to provide researchers with diverse, representative sample sizes. “When you get into research, sample size dictates a lot,” Stanley-Salazar says.
She also says Phoenix House works to stay visible in the research community. The organization belongs to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) clinical trials network, and its research department has met with the institute, the U.S. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment and the U.S. Department of Justice “to advise on what types of studies are needed, where in the field we could advance our understanding. But we don’t initiate the study,” Stanley-Salazar says.
Sell your story to researchers and funders.
“It sounds very crass to say this, but to get funding, there has to be an interesting story to tell about the program,” Morral says. What’s hard to sell, he says, is “something that looks unique and irreproducible, or that’s connected to the personal beliefs of the counselors themselves or the director, and where there’s no way of knowing if the service offered this week is the same as the service offered next week.”
Agencies must pitch a proposal that “persuasively suggests that … evaluating this program is going to have ramifications for other programs as well,” Morral says. RAND believed that Phoenix Academy was providing care that represented one of the standards of adolescent long-term residential treatment—the therapeutic community model—and that measuring its effectiveness could cast light on the effectiveness of similar programs.
Programs should also familiarize themselves with the focus and mission of potential research partners. “RAND’s mission is to conduct research on improving substance abuse treatment in the country—what policies can be modified and improved so that care is improved,” says Morral. “That’s what we’re getting out of it: the opportunity to look at substance abuse treatment policies and procedures.”
Additionally, Phoenix Academy provided RAND with detailed in-house data and information, so that when Morral applied for grants “it didn’t sound like I was unfamiliar with them.” Also key: “They promised access” to youth from the program.
When you think your program is ready, initiate contact with research organizations.
The seeds for the Phoenix Academy’s partnership with RAND were planted when the academy hired RAND for a relatively small project. “The first thing RAND did for us in 1995 was assist us in putting together our client information assessment tools—our client characteristics, intakes, screening and assessments,” Stanley-Salazar says. “That whole relationship evolved into various partnerships.”
Watch for funding streams.
Stanley-Salazar says Phoenix Academy and RAND work back and forth taking the lead in identifying and applying for grants.
“There are opportunities that come out of the government sometimes, and that come out of foundations, that can and do pay for projects once in a while,” Morral says. For example, he says, SAMHSA pays organizations to look at the effectiveness of manual-guided adolescent substance abuse treatments in community-based settings.
Roll up your sleeves.
Even if your program isn’t footing the financial bill for an evaluation, “there is a fair amount of work involved in talking with the researchers that are trying to get the funding, providing them input and information on what they’ve written about the program or are thinking about the program,” Morral says.
“There are difficult questions about access that have to be resolved,” he says. For instance: Can the researchers observe group sessions? Do the kids need to provide informed assent? How do researchers get parental consent?
Use what you learn and maintain your research partnership.
Once RAND’s outcome evaluation study showed the effectiveness of Phoenix Academy’s treatment, what the program needed next was “not necessarily another study,” Stanley-Salazar says.
Stanley-Salazar says that after the completion of the RAND outcome study, Phoenix Academy moved on, instituting a continuous quality improvement program and business evaluation program with RAND’s help.
Morral says that after one high-quality outcome evaluation, most programs are able to say, “Look, we are evidence-based,” and gain a foothold in the expanding number of evidence-based practice lists watched by funders.

Jennifer Moore can be reached at jmoore@youthtoday.org.

Continue reading Getting Evaluated—and Noticed

When a social justice organization joins the nonprofit sector, argues Andrea del Moral in LiP Magazine, it “must mimic corporate structure, entrench itself in government regulations and pander to foundations.” While this arrangement has provided some organizers stable work “with the corporate benefits of salaries, health care and retirement plans,” says del Moral, it has cost them the possibilty for true change.

About one in five kids between the ages of 12 and 17 keeps a blog, and twice as many read them. Blogs can lead to cyber-bullying and raise concerns about about a young person’s safety, reports The Christian Science Monitor, but there are also plenty of positive, educational ways for young people to use them. While students experiment with what to disclose and what to keep to themselves, schools struggle to find the line between protecting students posting (or being posted about) online and censoring them.

“Chronic poverty in rural areas, and urban areas for that matter, represents long-term neglect and lack of investment—a lack of investment in people as well as communities,” the PEN Weekly Newsblast summarized a recent interview with Cynthia Duncan, author of Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America. The interview was conducted by Frontline, which recently aired the documentary Country Boys, about two young men growing up in rural Appalachia.
“We know the investments in kids’ early education, youth’s engagement, stability of parents’ work and income make a difference,” said Duncan in the interview. So does “figuring out ways to expose people, especially kids, to another way of doing things and another set of aspirations for themselves that may be the root of starting a turnaround…I found that in both Appalachia and the Delta, the kids who made it were those who had mentors who believed in them, that when a young girl or boy would get special attention from a coach or teacher or an aunt or an uncle, it could make a big difference in the kind of decisions that he or she made going forward.”

The 40-year-old Cooperative Institutional Research Project Freshman Survey found that entering college freshman show a “distinctive and widespread” commitment to social justice and civic responsibility, USA Today reports. Researchers attribute this to the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina. “Last year’s natural disasters impacted these freshmen in a significant way,” said the survey’s director.
“These new data should encourage educators to redouble their efforts to create new connections between academic study and challenges in larger society,” advised the head of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Under community pressure, the Federal Communications Commission opened up the radio spectrum in the mid-1970s, making more room for community licenses. A “community radio movement” was born, and dozens of new stations came onto the listening spectrum, mostly in smaller markets across the nation.
On the technical side this miracle happened through the genius of a new generation of young techies, most of whom were hippies (precursors to geeks and dot-commers).
The programming itself was driven by a range of people including:
• 1960s and 70s politicos and “alternative journalists”;
• ethnic communities developing strategies for self-determination–Native American, Latino bilingual, and urban African-American stations;
• young people “breaking into” the media business.
In 1975, stations with similar goals formed the National Federation of Community Broadcasters in order to share programming and to lobby Congress for community-based stations’ piece of the radio spectrum pie.
At the tail end of this movement, in 1979, Louis Freedberg, a producer at KPFA in Berkeley, started Youth News, which taught a diverse group of local high school students how to produce news. Louis was in touch with the folks at Youth Communication, which published teen-written papers in New York and Chicago, and the groups saw themselves as linked through their work with young people and media, though the phrase “youth media” did not yet exist.
Youth News produced an occasional local show on commercial radio and mailed out a weekly half-hour segment on quarter-inch tape to community radio stations around the country, as many as 30-40 at the peak. Youth News gradually lost its edge in the funding world, and its activity dwindled, but never died. In between the adults coming and going, kids always kept Youth News alive, somehow or other.

Youth Radio grew out of this by switching focus from national tape distribution back to local programming. Beginning in 1990 with just a two-minute commentary on KQED in San Francisco, and a Friday night music and talk show on KPFB in Berkeley and Pacifica, over the next decade Youth Radio grew into a multiplatform organization with a variety of outlets serving both adults and youth.
Youth media led the alternative media movement of the 1990s and the new millennium. Young people transitioned Youth News to Youth Radio by insisting they be trained in music and technology. They did not want to be limited to “news,” especially since the journalistic profession was already losing the allure it had for diverse groups of Youth News students a decade earlier. On the contrary, one could posit that the current youth radio movement has its roots in rap music and culture.
Urban youth of the late 1980s and early 1990s were bored out of their minds attending failing schools. They were also watching their communities be ravaged by post-Reagan poverty, the invasion of crack cocaine, and gang violence in inner city neighborhoods. Like any self-respecting younger generation, they found expression in words and music.
These kids were tech-savvy and resourceful. Major record labels weren’t interested in their work, so they created their music in basement studios. Radio stations didn’t play their music, so they carried it around in boom boxes. Distribution was synonymous with “out of the trunk of a car.”
Gradually, these young people began to dominate youth culture not only nationally, but internationally.
During the 1990s, the rap music movement and the many tributaries of expression it engendered brought new energy to the connection between youth and “youth radio.” Kids wanted to be DJs, to make music, to be on the radio. Budding journalists who would normally have found an outlet in school newspapers instead found those publications axed in the mania of education cutbacks. These students are another major force in the building of the youth radio landscape.
The first Youth Radio-NFCB National Training for Youth in Radio Conference took place in 1999, and 35 young people attended. Each year since then the number of attendees has increased. The youth media movement has been powered by a distinctive set of circumstances in each medium–youth radio, youth video, and print media by and for teens. With the explosion of the web in the late 1990’s, the movement became more than the sum of its parts. And now many people actually know what we’re talking about when we say we work in “youth radio” or “youth media.” You can look around and see that we are a movement.
Ellin O’Leary is executive director/president of Youth Radio. Jayme Burke is Youth Radio’s director of strategic initiatives. “The Birth of Youth-Made Radio” was excerpted from a paper commissioned by the Open Society Institute for a March 2004 convening on youth media.
Above left: Hevanya Gardeen works the control boards at Youth Radio.

Continue reading History Flash: The Birth of Youth-Made Radio

Successful schools are built on the conviction that when adults care, students will achieve more, the American School Board Journal reports. A new study in the Journal of Adolescent Health provides hard evidence. The University of Chicago News Office reports that the research showed that having a teacher who students believe cares is associated with reduced antisocial behavior—like drug use and sexual risk—among teens.