State of Empowerment

Front matter

Low-Income Families and the New Welfare State

On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells ring at thousands of schools across the country. These bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important enriching activity: federally funded after-school programs offering tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision. After-school care reflects major shifts in social policy toward social services that support youth development and help low-income parents maintain employment. The scope of afterschool programs has grown significantly in the last two decades— nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students’ math and reading skills, these programs also teach important lessons to parents. In a remarkable turn of events—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated— government funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement. Using ethnographic accounts of three organizations, Carolyn Barnes reveals how interactions with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

Reversing the “gatekeeping” design of most programs targeting low-income citizens, after-school policy shifts power away from organizations and bureaucrats and puts it back in the hands of parents. After-school policy design rewards the inclusion of low-income parents—in program participation and decision-making—and elevates their status to parent-citizens.

Index

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10131793

1 e A New Kind of Safety Net

At around 3:00 on weekday afternoons, dismissal bells ring at thousands of schools across the country. For millions of students, these bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important educational activity: federally funded after-school programs offering tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision.

At Jackson Elementary! in Chicago, the end of the day is an “all hands on deck” exercise, as staff watch for what they call “riffraff” fights between students from rival schools or gangs. Teachers stand outside their classrooms monitoring lines of students while parents stream into the school’s front doors. Older students leave first to pick up younger siblings as staff members announce each parent's arrival over walkie-talkies. While this carefully managed sequence unfolds, a few dozen students climb the stairs for English tutoring with Mr. William and Ms. Cynthia, or math instruction with Mr. Michael.

A few blocks away, the after-school program at a nonprofit—Progress Youth Development Corp—is already underway. Parent volunteers are copying worksheets, counseling misbehaving students, and sharing gossip with one another and the staff. Ms. Brandy, a longtime Progress parent, snacks on an orange at the welcome desk alongside Lauren, a staff member, as the two work on a portfolio of student artwork for an upcoming awards ceremony. As they sort through the colorful construction paper, Brandy enthusiastically sings along to a gospel song playing in the background. Lauren seems unfazed by Brandy’s high-pitched singing—she looks over at Brandy and grins. Soon, students trickle in downstairs, scribbling their names on sign-in sheets and rushing to the playground, basketball court, and computer lab.

Meanwhile, at South End Community Center in Chicago’s Southside, dozens of after-school students dressed in uniforms—polos and khakis—sit at the homework table. Pencils and worksheets are out and backpacks are tucked under seats. Furrowed brows and concentrated looks are interrupted by giggles and restless energy as staff members struggle to keep students on task. Students who have completed their homework leave the table to play with their friends; in the center of the room, a half dozen students huddle on the floor near two large crates filled with oversized Lego blocks, dolls, and puzzles. A third grader slides crumpled worksheets into his backpack and then announces his plan to stay in touch with his classmates over the summer: “You know school is shutting down in a month, so I want to keep in touch with every boy.... I dunno about the girls.”

After-school programs like these are part of a vast but seldom discussed trend in social policy. In 2014, 10.2 million children participated in an afterschool program, up from 8.4 million in 2009, 6.5 million in 2004, and 1.7 million in 1991.” In 2014, nearly one in four families enrolled a child in an after-school program.’ And nearly one out of four low-income school-aged children participates in an after-school program.’ In 2015, federal and state governments spent roughly $25 million—nearly twice the amount spent on cash assistance—to support after-school programs, which aim to enrich youth development and boost academic performance through recreational activities, homework help, and extra instruction.’

The main contention of this book is that these programs do more than sharpen students’ math and reading skills; they also teach important lessons to parents. In a remarkable turn of events—especially given the long history of punitive social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated®’—government-funded after-school programs quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement. Through personal interactions with staff, volunteer opportunities, and formal leadership roles, low-income parents are drawn into community affairs, local government, and American civic life. By mobilizing those least likely to participate, afterschool programs can close the gaps in political participation between the advantaged and the disadvantaged and strengthen democratic citizenship for the most vulnerable. The purpose of this book is to explain how these programs empower the disadvantaged.

Rebecca—a single mother of four—attributes her civic and political engagement to her involvement in a local nonprofit that provides after-school childcare to her four children. Despite her neighborhood’s climbing crime rate and deteriorating conditions, the program gave her hope that her community could change. Since enrolling her children in the after-school program, Rebecca has organized support groups; volunteered as a teacher’s assistant; and gained experience with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Today, she votes, runs a book club for kids in her neighborhood, and has organized a petition to keep the neighborhood library open. Anita tells a similar story. The volunteer opportunities at Jackson Elementary’s afterschool program taught her communication and organizing skills. She used her new skills and confidence to work with neighbors to address violence on her block.

Of course, not all after-school programs equally prepare parents for civic and political activity. One after-school program I studied —South End—did little to motivate or equip parents for civic and political life. Staff at this program rarely asked parents to volunteer or assume leadership roles, and parents took note. For example, when the program failed to make much of an impact in her declining neighborhood, Sharon took it as a sign that there was little hope for change in her community. On the whole, her experiences reinforced her apathy about participation and politics.

In many cases, the effects of after-school programs on parents’ civic and political orientation are profound and even surprising. How do some afterschool programs—which are designed to bolster children’s academic success—wind up teaching parents lessons about democracy?

At first blush, it is tempting to reduce these mothers’ accounts to textbook stories of political mobilization. One could argue that organizations implementing these programs intentionally encouraged participation, each varying in its strategies and how well it mobilized parents.” But during my time at these after-school programs, I learned that the political lessons parents gleaned were largely unintentional. Rebecca’s and Anitas paths to participation and Sharon’s road to political (dis)engagement represent a more nuanced story about the unintended consequences of public policy: how public policy, once diffused through organizations, can influence citizens’ interest and capacity for participation.’

Policy’s ability to shape whether and how citizens participate is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, scholars have long surmised that “new policies create politics”? and demonstrated how types of policies reconfigure the political landscape and mobilize organized interest groups.” In recent years, the intersection of public policy and mass political behavior has been an emerging topic of study in political science."! Political scientists have begun to explore how policy influences the political behavior of everyday people. These “policy feedback” scholars suggest that citizens’ interpret their encounters with the state (e.g., public bureaucracies such as a Social Security Administration office, welfare agency, or the police) as a “microcosm of government.” !”

The nature and quality of these encounters with the state influence whether citizens can or want to participate. Policies can provide resources and incentives for participation or “resource effects” and policies can have “interpretive effects,” sending important messages to citizens about how the government works, their political and social standing, and how the government responds to people like them.!?

Policy features—whether policies are generous, universal, and bureaucratic or meager, targeted, and stigmatizing—convey these messages. For example, studies suggest that generous programs like the GI Bill and universal programs like Social Security confer ample resources for political participation and convey elevated political standing to the advantaged with simple application procedures that legitimize their claims on the state. 14 Tn contrast, the meager benefits of many targeted means-tested programs undermine capacity for participation. Further, burdensome stigma-laden eligibility processes, directive program requirements, and caseworkers’ intrusive supervision dampen political engagement among the poor.”

While demonstrating how policy shapes politics, this body of research has largely focused on public bureaucracies as venues of political learning.'® Scholars have not yet explained how the after-school programs Rebecca, Anita, and Sharon encountered influence their capacity and desire to participate. These after-school programs—though created and supported by policy—do not resemble the centralized public bureaucracies or cash assistance programs that have been the topic of policy feedback research. Key features of after-school programs represent important shifts in social policy that complicate how we currently understand policy’s effects on political participation.

The Emergence of Social Services

Most policy feedback studies on low-income citizens focus on the negative political consequences of cash-based assistance and larger “in-kind aid, means-tested programs delivered through large bureaucracies.” But the after-school programs in this study are part of a new class of assistance programs—work supports—which have assumed an important role in social policy since welfare reform. Since the passage of welfare reform in the mid-1990s, cash assistance has been replaced with publicly funded social services designed to help low-income citizens find and maintain employment.!8 Many of these services do more than determine eligibility or distribute benefits. The after-school programs that are the focus of this book aim to support low-income parents as they work, nurture child and youth development, and improve academic performance. In keeping with these goals, after-school policies require new program features, new kinds of relationships between staff and clients, and ultimately new feedback processes that counter conventional wisdom about the demobilizing consequences of programs that target the poor.

The Rise of New Public Management

Along with reflecting the growing trend in social services, after-school programs are also subject to new public management reforms, a set of policy tools’? that are prominent in social policy governance but seldom studied in policy feedback research. Over the last three decades, governments have transformed the welfare state”® by delegating service delivery to nonstate actors, infusing market logic into service delivery, and implementing new systems of accountability. These tools are designed to create leaner and more responsive safety-net programs.

In theory, delegated governance, or the delegation of policy implementation to nonstate actors, should reduce the size of the state and harness market dynamics to produce more efficient service delivery. Nonstate actors are not subject to civil service regulations and salary requirements that increase production costs of services, and thus should deliver services at less cost.?! Further, competitive government contracts and grants processes disrupt the government’s monopoly on service provision and incentivize organizations to drive down the cost of service delivery to win funding.” Finally, vouchers that allow citizens to choose service providers create a quasi-market for services. Ideally, this competition for clients would encourage providers to offer cheaper services that match client preferences.

Along with cost savings, proponents of delegated governance claim that service delivery through nonstate actors offers flexibility and innovation. Contracts and grants can be cut back or changed quickly as government priorities shift, and delegated governance allows organizations to tailor services to community needs.”

Performance and accountability became an important component of policy implementation alongside delegated governance especially during the Clinton Administration with the enactment of the U.S. Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993. Aimed at correcting the “insufficient attention to program performance” and reducing “waste and inefhciency” in federal programs, GPRA required federal agencies to outline performance goals and annually report agency success and reasons for program failures. Since the passage of GPRA, performance monitoring systems and accountability regimes have emerged across a range of policy contexts— from welfare to education policy—and influence policy implementation in public, private for-profit, and nonprofit agencies.”

Taken together, these new public management tools—delegated governance, market logic, and performance and accountability regimes—have permeated social policy. Now, states, counties, and municipalities have administrative authority to devise a range of programs, and a host of nonstate actors deliver these programs. All of these entities face pressures to perform and are subject to accountability structures that measure and reward progress and—in many cases—punish failure.

While nearly ubiquitous across policy contexts, studies are inconclusive on whether new public management tools are effective in social policy. Some studies suggest that delegated governance, market incentives, and performance pressures undermine policy objectives and create perverse incentives for organizations and bureaucrats.

On delegated governance, critics question whether nonstate actors actually deliver more efficient services. The market for services is rarely competitive—only a few well-established service providers win contracts and grants. These established service providers further limit competition by building relationships with government agencies that ensures them a stream of grants and contracts in the future.” Further undermining market competition, consumers seldom choose the highest quality services or leave poor service providers because they lack information about options or—in some cases—have too many options to choose from.” As a result, the threat of market discipline doesn’t always prompt providers to offer high-quality costeffective services that match citizens’ preferences.

Performance standards and accountability regimes similarly fall short in practice. In theory, specifying measures to ensure that policies are implemented in ways that reflect policy aims should solve the age-old principalagent problem—agencies’ propensity to drift from policy objectives. However, creating measures that match policy aims—especially in complex human services—proves difficult” and, as policy implementation becomes more diffuse, performance becomes increasingly difficult to monitor. Further, evidence suggests that performance and accountability pressures negatively affect bureaucrats’ behavior toward citizens. For example, studies show that caseload reduction benchmarks in the cash-based assistance program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), pressure bureaucrats to move former welfare clients into work without regard to the quality of job placements or work activities. They also encourage workers to sanction clients at higher rates to “make the numbers.”**

After-school programs have been subject to the same policy tools: ones of delegated governance, marketization, and growing accountability. But much of this research has focused on student outcomes and shows mixed results. Some studies point to marginal improvement in math and reading scores among elementary students” or no significant changes at all. It is also unclear whether delegated governance and competitive markets lead to better and more efficient programs.” As mentioned, the market for contracts and grants are not as competitive as they seem and parents and students lack complete information about the market to evaluate program quality.*! Finally, outsourcing service delivery to private organizations can “lengthen the chains of delegation,’ diminishing the government’s ability to monitor or reward service providers.”

These studies rarely examine how new public management tools influence parents’ experiences with these programs. After-school programs have substantial guidelines on how to engage parents. When these guidelines work in tandem with new public management tools, they can positively shape parents’ experience with these programs.

What about Democratic Citizenship?

Nascent evidence paints an even grimmer picture of how elements of new public management—delegated governance and market accountability— shapes mass politics. Scholars cast these less visible forms of governance as undermining democratic accountability because citizens cannot readily perceive the government’s work in their everyday lives enough to evaluate it. Because governance is diffuse and policy is enacted and delivered through “smoke and mirrors” of the tax code, subsidies, and delegated governance, citizens cannot recognize how they benefit from policies.” As a result, the “hollow state”*4 ends up fostering confusion about government, resentment about government responsiveness, or passivity.”

This book tells a more positive story about how features of the seemingly hidden welfare state can strengthen democratic citizenship for the disadvantaged. Previous accounts of delegated governance focus on policies that offer less direct services and limited interactions with service providers. For example, Morgan and Campbell’s study of seniors’ use of the Medicare Advantage program and the Part D drug benefit demonstrates the pitfalls of delegated governance and consumer choice models of service delivery.’ They find little change in attitudes toward government involvement in health care or any change in solidarity among seniors, despite their dissatisfaction with plans and the markets’ inefficiency. Instead, the complex web of nonstate providers demobilized citizens, who might otherwise call for greater health-care reform, and mobilized interest groups and commercial stakeholders who have a vested interest in protecting the consumer choice feature of the policy.

But with Medicare Advantage and the Part D drug benefits, seniors’ interactions with providers are limited to open enrollment periods and individual claims. As mentioned, after-school care is a social service designed to enable parents to work and to support the development and academic enrichment of school-aged children. After-school programs are typically long-term and require consistent interactions with service providers. Parents may communicate with service providers daily for months or years. Thus service providers are especially visible to parents even if the policies behind the programs are not.

Given the intensive and visible nature of service delivery, it is important to understand how policies influence the way these programs work on the ground. We need to understand how shifts in governance and the emergence of performance and accountability regimes influence key elements of program experiences that are crucial to how citizens evaluate program experiences and choose to engage in civic and political activity.

For instance, how do forms of delegated governance influence the kinds of civic and political lessons parents learn from these programs? And in what ways do performance and accountability pressures inform how staff members treat parents? As this book will show, forms of indirect or hidden governance aren't always bad, in so far as they encourage more supportive ways of engaging disadvantaged citizens. As chapters 2 and 3 will demonstrate, these tools do not always have negative effects but can produce both inclusive programs that incorporate parents into service delivery and positive empowering relationships between parents and staff.

This book argues that the shift toward social services and new public management in social policy can produce new kinds of policy feedback processes that empower rather than alienate low-income citizens. To be clear, this book does not evaluate the efficiency of the market for after-school care, nor does it examine how well performance measures and accountability measures keep programs in line with policy aims. Other scholars have written volumes on these topics.*”

Instead, as a case of both social service delivery and new public management tools, I show how low-income parents encounter a “state of empowerment” through after-school policy. I demonstrate how after-school policy can politically empower parents through capacity-building roles within programs, supportive relationships with staff members, and by the way policy empowers organizations to uniquely serve neighborhoods.

Empowerment through Capacity-Building Roles

After-school policy rules require parent involvement roles that can equip low-income parents with skills for political participation. Scholars have long examined the costs of political and civic participation as a barrier for the disadvantaged. Low-income citizens lack the time to participate, money to contribute to political campaigns and causes, or civic skills—communication, leadership, and organizational skills relevant to political participation.** Although settings like schools, workplaces, churches, and voluntary organizations inculcate civic skills and interests, policies themselves can fill these resource gaps. For example, the GI Bill and higher education policies boost citizens’ capacity for involvement through education resources that enhance civic skills and economic resources for political activity.*?

Policy can also enhance civic and political resources by prescribing participatory roles—or what I call capacity-building roles—for recipients. In particular, sharing decision-making power with recipients signals the value of their voice in service delivery. However, participatory roles can also provide opportunities to practice civic skills. Guidelines prescribed by policies like Title I and the 21st Century Community Learning Center grant require staff to partner with parents in service delivery through parent advisory boards and volunteer roles. As chapter 5 will explore, these opportunities teach parents how to write letters, engage in decision-making, give speeches and presentations, and organize program activities. Far from being just a setting that enriches children, after-school programs also teach parents the skills needed for civic and political participation in their communities.

Empowerment through Relationships

Along with empowering program design, after-school policy encourages empowering relationships between low-income citizens and bureaucrats. After-school policy rules require cooperative long-term interactions between parents and staff rather than impersonal or contentious exchanges. Further, new public management tools like market competition, accountability, and performance metrics incentivize these personal relationships by tying organizational resources to student enrollment, retention, and attendance. Instead of deterring program use, staff work to attract and keep families in programs. No study has examined how these kinds of incentives shape program experiences or explored the political consequences of these new kinds of relationships.

Supportive rather than alienating relationships between parents and staff can be politically empowering to parents as avenues of recruitment into skill-building parental involvement roles and civic and political activity. As political scientists note, relationships are the way ordinary citizens are drawn into political participation and civic life.*° Political recruiters use personal relationships with individuals to identify prospects for political participation and use nonpolitical organizations as venues of recruitment.*! In the same way, staff members in these after-school programs can leverage relationships with parents to recruit ideal candidates for both participatory roles within the program and civic and political activity outside of it. In this sense, afterschool policy can mirror the recruitment and resource effects of universal programs like Social Security that draws low-income seniors into politics by connecting them to organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and to senior centers, sites of political recruitment.

Empowerment through Place-Based Organizations

Finally, parents experience empowerment through the ways organizations interact with neighborhoods. Because of the new public management shift toward decentralization and delegated governance, community-based organizations now deliver the bulk of social services.“ How these place-based organizations uniquely deliver services can influence the kinds of civic and political lessons parents draw from policy. These organizations, whether public or private, are not impartial conduits of policy. They have distinct identities—who they view themselves to be and how they construe the boundaries of their work—that can shape how they implement policy. Organizations’ identities are constructed by organizational leadership and through the interactions and shared discourse of its members. These members draw from their own characteristics—in the case of these programs, their social identities, professional experiences, and, in some instances, faith backgrounds—to arrive at a consensus of who the organization is and what the organization does.

As “place-based organizations,’ after-school programs may develop identities that reflect their collective understanding of the organization’s role within community contexts and deliver services with these roles in mind. Indeed, sociologist Celeste Watkins-Hayes notes, “welfare bureaucracies do not operate in a vacuum; environmental context matters.” And, as Smith and Lipsky note, tailoring programs to fit local conditions is a key intent of delegated governance. Organizations can design programs “in accord with community need and sentiment.”** Organizations can be outward facing, adopting community-building objectives, or insular, adopting narrow service delivery aims.“ And these “place-based” roles can convey distinct messages about local forms of political and civic engagement.

Feedback studies are only beginning to explore how place shapes the way individuals experience programs and interpret politics.“ And studies that do take up this question focus on how state variation in eligibility rules and benefits affects political participation.” But neighborhood contexts can influence how individuals experience policy and act as a powerful lens through which citizens make sense of politics. Community contexts can amplify intersecting identities of race and class in ways that influence citizens’ views of government responsiveness (external political efficacy) and their own capacity to participate (internal political efficacy).>!

Place or neighborhood contexts can determine opportunities for participation,’ compounding the resources and advantages of the affluent and reinforcing resource deficits experienced by low-income citizens. Social isolation coupled with dwindling elements of civic society can constrain political participation in inner-city communities. Deteriorating neighborhood conditions such as crime, unemployment, high mortality rates, and residential instability further diminish participation by eroding forms of collective and political efficacy.

If place informs the way citizens think and act politically, then how service providers engage communities may have spillover effects on political participation. This book begins to examine how place matters for policy implementation, program experiences, and political participation.

Taken together, after-school policy as an illustrative case of the emergence of social services and new public management tools offers new opportunities to understand policy feedback: how the implementation of policies affects beneficiaries’ relationship with the state and their civic and political lives. Figure 1.1 summarizes the empowerment processes of after-school policy discussed above.

To summarize the empowerment process, I argue that policy—through policy rules and tools—determine whether parents experience empowering program design by requiring capacity-building roles in the form of parental involvement opportunities. Policy rules and tools prescribe empowering relationships, supportive interactions between parents and staff that boost parents’ agency in programs.

In addition, policy empowers organizations with the latitude to implement services through the lens of their own identities, which often incorporates the needs of the communities they serve. Organizations develop their own community roles and implement programs that correspond to these roles.

I argue that parents experience empowerment through program design, relationships, and organizations in three ways: through resource feedback, through recruitment feedback, and through place-based interpretive feedback processes. Through their relationships with staff members, a select group of

Policy Guidelines Incentives Place -Based Interpretive Resource Recruitment Feedback Feedback Feedback Empowerment Empowering Empowering via Program Design Relationships Organizations Individual Level Outcomes l Place -Based Political Efficacy Capacity Place -Based Building Participation Place -Based Participation

Fig. 1.1. The Empowerment Process parents are recruited into parental involvement roles where they gain civic skills—an important resource for participation—and become more interested in community affairs and participation. On recruitment feedback processes, parents who are recruited into parent involvement roles are often asked to participate in local forms of civic and political activity. Finally, for place-based interpretive feedback, the scope of program design—whether programs work to the improve neighborhood conditions or narrowly target students and families—can convey powerful messages on whether neighborhood change is feasible and model effective forms of political engagement that can bring about that change. The coming chapters flesh out these processes in greater detail.

Methodological Approach: Comparative Ethnographic Case Study

Data for this book comes from participant observations and parent and staff interviews from three after-school programs: Jackson Elementary’s after-school program and the after-school programs at Progress Youth Development Corp and South End Community Center. I selected these programs because each was subject to a different policy that has its own rules prescribing student and—for the purposes of this book—parent activities and its own distinct policy tools to ensure compliance to rules. Jackson Elementary’s after-school program is funded by Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which broadly supports schools serving low-income students and specifically targets after-school programs that serve low-income students at risk of failing to meet state achievement standards.** Title I guidelines prescribe specific parental involvement opportunities (e.g., school-wide Title I parent meetings, Parent Advisory Councils, School Compacts, and parent volunteer roles) as a way to support students’ academic success.” Title I’s primary policy tool is public accountability through monitoring (e.g., audits) and reporting requirements.

I chose Progress Youth Development Corp’s after-school program because it is funded by the 21st Century Community Learning Center (21st CCLC) grant, which targets low-income at-risk students to boost standardized test scores. Much like Title I funding, the 21st CCLC grant also encourages parental involvement opportunities. However, Progress is a case of delegated governance and the 21st CCLC grant has looser parameters for student and parent programming. Nevertheless, 21st CCLC similarly monitors compliance to policy rules through an annual reporting requirement, where staff must report progress against a set of performance measures. Finally, I selected South End Community Center’s after-school program because most of its operating budget comes from Child Care Subsidy reimbursements. The Child Care Subsidy requires close adherence to staff-to-student ratios and health and safety guidelines, but it does not require parental involvement roles.* In addition, the Child Care Subsidy implements a consumer choice model through parent vouchers for services. Providers must compete for students.”

By selecting programs that are governed by distinct policies, I could trace processes within and across cases’ to examine how each policy’s rules and tools determined formal elements of program design and the civic and political lessons parents learned from programs.

To collect the data for this study, I spent 15 to 20 hours a week over the course of two years, as a volunteer and researcher. I worked as an eighth-grade tutor and a music teacher and coordinated program events including block parties, coat drives, and basketball tournaments in the community. I also assisted with classroom management, chaperoned daily bus trips from schools to the program, and monitored parent pick-up. I shadowed the staff and took on their responsibilities to understand how they managed limited resources, scarce time, and challenging circumstances with families. As a consistent long-term volunteer, I also became personally acquainted with parents and talked with them about students’ behavior and academic progress, family, and weekend plans.

I immersed myself in the day-to-day life of these programs in hopes of developing detailed or “thick descriptions” of how parents and staff constructed meaning in these settings and how behaviors were “produced, perceived, and interpreted.”*’ Through immersion, I learned the daily rhythm of these programs—how workers delivered after-school care and how parents and students experienced these programs. In appendix A I describe this process in great detail—how I selected programs, how I got to know programs, how I recruited study participants and the questions I asked them. Parent and staff members’ demographic characteristics are described in the coming chapters but are also in the appendix.