FORESHADOWING QUESTIONS B7

FOR EVALUATING SERVICE PROGRAMS TO YOUTH

These are not questionnaire questions. They are issue-questions for organizing evaluation studies. They are rhetorical questions, not expecting an answer.

These issues have been gathered here to stimulate the thinking of evaluation specialists (and others) as they are getting newly acquainted with youth programs, to help them expand their scope and draw in their attentions, to help them give priority to questions and ways of spending their time. It is recognized that there are a great many additional observations they will have to make to get the picture of the programs, and to come to understand what are seen to be the more important questions at the sites.

 

  1. Is there good communication and working relationship between community and program, also among governmental, ethnic, industrial and school entities?
  2. Is there undesirable interference or redundancy of services created by new efforts to provide youth assistance?
  3. Are youth services conceptually in tune with services for the mid-age unemployed, the soon to retire, and the retired?
  4. Do youth services of this sort -- in effect -- relieve governments and industries of their proper responsibility to provide employment and training opportunities?
  5. Are the youth activities integrated into school offerings or considered adjunct and peripheral? What does the grand plan say?
  6. Are the youth services in fact as good as the community’s other social services?
  7. Do youth get better access to information about interests and abilities, about job requirements and opportunities?
  8. Do youngsters learn more about the difference between craft and opportunistic entrepreneurship?
  1. Are youth taught responsibilities and opportunities for job redesign? for collective (union) action? Are they taught the personal and societal consequences of work?
  2. Are separate needs of boys and girls adequately realized? How about handicapped youngsters? migrant youngsters? How about the special needs of youngsters from different cultural backgrounds?
  3. Are staff members responsible for youth services personally experienced with a diversity of living and working conditions? Is the experience sufficiently recent? Is there exchange of school and business personnel? What is done to increase such an experience base?
  4. Do staff and volunteers share in the responsibility for the services? What preparation have they for taking responsibility?
  1. Are youth workers teachers or civil servants or neither?
  2. Do the persons in charge exploit the variety of roles that parents and family play in helping the youngster toward social and economic maturity?
  1. Do these services emphasize the modern dependency of workers on jobs created by business and industry or is there an exploration of the possibilities of youngsters singly or collectively creating their own income opportunities? Do they encourage exploration of entrepreneurial lines? Do they encourage young "inventors"?
  2. Is there realization of the increasing period that youngsters in technical societies experience, now beyond age 25 in the United States, alternating among post-secondary schooling, working, and unemployment, without strong commitment to what will be a life-time work? Is this period treated as a period of irresponsibility or opportunity?
  1. Are work experiences organized or supervised by the staff related to the student’s interests, aptitudes, and need for broadened experience? Do they provide experience with responsibility as well as experience with subordination?
  2. Are part-time cooperative work programs organized to benefit the youngster, the parent, the employer, the school? Are decisions on what knowledge the project will provide based on a proper compromise in these interests?
  1. Are cooperative work programs coordinated with other youth services?
  2. Are these programs having the effect of teaching most youngsters that they are unsuited for work in technological, professional or entrepreneurial occupations and thus unnecessarily perpetuating a socially immobile lower working class? Are only lower class students involved? Are only lower class occupations involved?
  1. Are credits toward graduation given for successful participation in youth programs? Do such credits violate the practice and the various expectations people have as to what should earn credit toward graduation?
  2. Is the emphasis in these youth services local, national, or international, such that the youngster entertains ideas of working both close to home and far from home? How is the idea of "worker mobility" treated?
  1. Are disproportionate resources spent for information services while present information is underused?
  2. Do these services "imply" that national manpower estimates (or state or local) are the proper indication of what the work force should be and that youngsters should submit their own aspirations to the "official" view?
  1. Some writers distinguish between "helping youth over common obstacles to work-entry" and "preparing youth for the lifelong eventualities of uncertainty, changing demands, having to start over, etc." Does this distinction lie at the root of major disagreements (at the site) about youth services?
  2. Is there a suitable effort within these services to ready the youngster both for employment and general adult responsibility?