Acknowledgments

This report resulted from the combined efforts of researchers, data collection experts, and school staff who are too numerous to all be thanked by name. The authors want to recognize Elizabeth Warner at the Institute of Education Sciences for her encouragement and support and for her incisive reviews as the report went from draft to final, and Ricky Takai and Phoebe Cottingham at the Institute of Education Sciences for their helpful comments. We thank Alan Krueger and two anonymous referees for reviewing and commenting on drafts. We thank the staff of the 21st-Century program office at the U.S. Department of Education for their assistance and support in launching the evaluation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation for financial support that enabled us to broaden the evaluation.

Keith Appleby, Heather Berry, Jan Fertig, Jessica Wilkins, Valerie Williams, and Claire Wilson assisted in managing the data collection. Richard Heman-Ackah, Larry Snell, and Marianne Stevenson, and their interviewing and data collection staff at phone centers in Columbia, Maryland, and Princeton, N.J., put in many hours of effort to collect the data. We also thank Angela Richardson, Peter Crosta, Anne Bloomenthal, Josh Hart, Leonard Hart, Ece Kalay, Barbara Kolln, Sedhou Ranganathan, for information systems and programming support, and Angela Richardson and Peter Crosta for their steady managerial assistance. We would also like to thank Mike Sinclair and Frank Potter for creating nonresponse weights for the study.

Many school district and after-school program staff assisted the evaluation by providing data and by assisting in site visits. We appreciate their willingness to respond to many requests and to contribute their perspectives and insights during interviews.

The report was produced by Jill Miller with assistance from Marjorie Mitchell.