The Best of Both Worlds: Connecting Schools and Community Youth Organizations for All-Day,All-Year Learning

Abstract

This article considers ways that schools and community-based youth organizations (CBOs) could build upon each other's strengths, respond explicitly to the realities of today's youth, and incorporate the attributes of the learning environments youth find most effective. Our analysis is based primarily on 5 years of field research in more than 60 successful youth organizations in three major urban communities, and it is supplemented by interviews with students participating in a comparative field study of secondary schools. We argue for serious and far-reaching rethinking of relationships among schools and other youth-based organizations in the community. In the past decade, almost unnoticed by educators, CBOs have been creating and maintaining institutions that are highly educational and keenly oriented toward preparation for employment. We call on educators to consider what it might take to enlist and elicit the best of this world to forge all-day, all-year learning opportunities for youth.