The original focus of our study was on school-based and school-sponsored programs, as discussed in Secs. 1-3. Our analysis of these programs revealed some important, inherent limitations. Most notably, these programs serve only those teen parents who choose to remain in school, and who learn about and choose to enter a special teen parent program. None of the programs we visited had any outreach component designed to attract school dropouts, or even to recruit current students who might not know of the program. Most, in fact, were unable to serve all of those students who requested program services. Consequently, the use of limited program resources to reach additional teen parents did not make sense.
Data on pregnancy-precipitated dropout rates (e.g., Upchurch and McCarthy, 1989) indicate that teen parents who remain in school constitute a distinct minority--those, one could argue, who pose the lowest risk of being trapped in long-term poverty (e.g., Roosa, 1986). We felt it important to examine programs that attempt to serve dropouts and improve the life chances of those teen parents who may be at higher risk.
Our school program data also revealed that those programs, as part of large school bureaucracies, are often constrained in terms of their ability to innovate or accommodate to the needs of their clientele. To some degree, this may reflect the scarce resources available to most programs. We hoped that by looking at programs that were sponsored by community-based organizations, we could gain some insight into the possibilities and limits of innovation in teen parent programs. Often, school-based programs are rather isolated from other potential sources of services, such as medical care and welfare support. We wondered if community-based programs might be able to forge closer links to other support services because they themselves are part of that community. Interviews in community-based programs would help to address that question.
Our analyses of school-based programs (Secs. 2-3) revealed that most are organized around a crisis model, which dictates that the period immediately surrounding pregnancy and delivery is crucial for helping teen parents cope in the short and long term. Consistent with the crisis model, the programs that we visited provided a wide range of services, usually for a short period of time. Community-based programs, which often become involved with teen parents somewhat after "the crisis" period had passed, might well adhere to a different model, perhaps one in which the value of long-term services and support was emphasized. We were curious to examine the effects, if any, of a longer-term approach.
Since community-based programs are out in the community, we were particularly interested in discovering whether they, more than the school-based programs we had visited, focused their resources and goals on the development and use of vocational education and job training opportunities for their enrollees. In school-based programs, we had discovered that vocational education often took a back seat to parenting education and progress toward high school graduation; we wondered if community-based programs achieved a different balance among these goals.
We visited a small number of community-based programs to supplement our school-based and school-sponsored program sample and to allow us to pursue some of these issues. The goals of our investigation of community-based programs were to:
| 1. | Assess the degree to which their enrollee populations differ from those of the school-based programs. In particular, we wanted to determine the extent to which they serve dropouts and how these dropouts come to be involved in program activities. |
| 2. | Examine program models, exploring in particular whether community-based programs provide more flexibility in terms of program model and program activities. |
| 3. | Explore whether community-based programs appear to be more closely linked to other community resources available to teen parents. If this is the case, what is it that promotes such linkages? |
| 4. | Determine the degree to which community-based programs balance education, support, and vocational education and job training. |
The seven programs discussed in this section were selected at two different points in the study. Four were selected earlier, as part of the initial fieldwork sample. Our discussion of these four programs in Secs. 2-3 focused on the educational services that these programs provide. In this section, we include a discussion of the community component of each of these four programs, and discuss them along with the three "pure" community programs, which were selected later. The selection of each of these subsamples is discussed in turn in Sec. 1.
Given limited resources, our community sample was necessarily small and our visits brief.[45] However, we did attempt to ensure that taken together, the three newly selected programs and the four previously selected ones provided a range of vocational education opportunities to program enrollees. In our sample of seven programs, five indicated that they provide specific job skills, training, and guidance, and two programs provide work socialization or guidance only.
RAND staff members visited each of the three new programs for one to three days. A total of 39 respondents were interviewed on-site. These interviews were conducted with program directors, counselors, teachers, enrollees, and juvenile court personnel who worked with the program and welfare department.
Field staff used open-ended field interview guides in the three new programs, similar to those used for the school-based programs. On average, interviews lasted one hour. Interviews focused on the goals and operations of the program, the provision of vocational education, and the vocational opportunities available to enrollees, both within and outside the program. Considerable time was spent during each visit observing program operations.
At the conclusion of the fieldwork, a case study was written for each program that followed closely the outline for the school-based program case studies to ensure that reports contained comparable information that allowed for comparisons across programs.
This section summarizes and synthesizes the case studies written by site visitors to the three community-based programs, and incorporates community elements from the four community-based programs discussed in the school programs sections as well. The findings presented here are those that appear most consistently and compellingly across the case studies, although findings unique to a particular program or program type are often noted as such.
In Sec. 1 we discussed the limitations of our analysis of the school-sponsored programs, which included the lack of representativeness of the sample and the fact that we did not attempt to give equal weight to the case study material in our analysis or conclusions. A third limitation must be added to this section: the fact that four of the programs discussed were already included in the school-sponsored programs sections.
Although we focus our analyses on the three new programs, and limit the analysis of the four previously discussed programs to their community-relevant aspects, it is critical that the reader keep in mind that Secs. 2-4 do not treat independent samples.
Most of the programs were started to promote economic self-sufficiency in young mothers. In two cases the impetus came from external funding sources. In one case the request was made to an existing community-based organization (CBO); in the second, a new organization was formed. More typically, the push came from CBO staff who perceived a need among their current clientele or in the community at large. When programs were established within existing CBOs, organizational support was derived from the compatibility of program and CBO goals, e.g., serving women in the community. In one CBO, support for the program was particularly strong because existing programs, targeted to more affluent women, were undersubscribed, and staff felt that the organization needed a new mission.
Unlike the school-based programs, none of the "pure" community programs at first espoused educational goals. In each case, program planners took on larger goals, such as economic self-sufficiency and improved life circumstances. However, these larger goals logically included educational ones. Ultimately, the programs found themselves devoting large amounts of time and resources to educational services, as discussed below.
Community programs do not face the limit inherent in school-based programs--that a teen parent must leave when she reaches school-leaving age or when she graduates. Indeed, in our seven community programs, we found more flexibility with regard to how long teen mothers could remain in the program. Although most imposed some limit on time in the program, these limits tended to be considerably longer than those imposed by the school-based programs. But limits as long as a year or 18 months were still viewed by some staff as overly rigid. Noting that enrollees came from very deprived backgrounds and received little family support, the case managers in one community program agreed that the ideal program needs to provide general and vocational education and to provide it within an extended, even open-ended, time frame--one that allows for entry, failure, reentry, failure, reentry, and, hopefully, the eventual acquisition of marketable skills.
The three "pure" community-based programs that we visited were less likely to adhere to the crisis model than the four programs with heavy school involvement. As shown in Table 4.1, these "pure" community-based programs provided either sequential services, where enrollees moved from the program to an adult jobs-training program, or long-term case management services, in which enrollees were linked as needed to a range of community services, including educational services (usually GED preparation). The former two programs had established time limits for remaining in the program; the latter had not.
| Program Characteristics | ||||||||
| Program Model | N | Enrollment Period | Population Served | |||||
| Crisis/comprehensive services | 3*** | No limit (two programs); short term only (1 program) | School-aged pregnant and parenting teens enrolled in school | |||||
| Short-term/limited services | 1* | Extended time allowed but rarely used | School-aged parents enrolled in school | |||||
| Sequential | 2 | Time limits--12 and 18 months | Teen parents | |||||
| Long-term case management | 1 | Unlimited | Teen parents and other welfare mothers | |||||
NOTE: Each asterisk indicates a program discussed in Secs. 2-3. | ||||||||
The crisis model did not characterize any of the "pure" programs; eligibility did not commence at the time that a pregnancy was revealed and end soon after delivery. However, like the school-sponsored programs, these "pure" community programs attempted to provide teen parents everything they needed--educational remediation, counseling and support, work education and job training, and an understanding of the resources they could use in the future--in a brief, prespecified period. They could not offer the luxury of self-paced, open-ended learning to their enrollees; even in the sequential programs, limited time was provided for the acquisition of specific skills (e.g., completion of a diploma or the GED).
To a substantial degree, the community programs share the same overarching goals for teen parents as the school-based ones. In every one, long-term goals include high school completion, parenting skills, and economic self-sufficiency. In the short term, the programs focus on school completion and parenting skills. Only those programs that receive outside funds that mandate job-skills training and set up job placement as a program outcome devote substantial time to these latter goals, as discussed below.
Although community-based programs share an educational emphasis with school-based programs, the community-based programs are more willing than the schools to promote the GED. They do so because the GED preparation is self-paced, so enrollees can both gauge and accelerate their own progress. Consequently, a motivated person with sufficient skills can move quickly through the program. These features are widely viewed as critical, since program staff believe that they cannot assume substantial academic commitment on the part of program enrollees, many of whom are school dropouts. Education is often perceived strictly as a means to an end: employability. The GED can get them there faster and with fewer obstacles on the way.[46]
Of the seven community-based programs that we visited, three helped enrollees to get GEDs, one offered enrollees a choice of GED preparation or enrollment in a diploma-granting program, and the remainder promoted high school completion. These latter two programs were those most closely linked with the schools. In one of these programs, in fact, the program provided child care adjacent to the regular school site so that teen parents could remain in the regular high school. In a second, district teachers came to the program site to provide diploma-oriented instruction.
Five of the seven community-based programs that we visited regard the development of parenting competency as one of its major program goals. Such an emphasis was surprising on two counts. First, the average age of program enrollees in the community-based programs is higher than that in the school-based programs, as discussed below. One might expect that parenting education would be considered less urgent in these older populations for maturational reasons. Second, since most of the programs enroll dropouts, who typically left school in response to their pregnancy and may have remained out of school for some time, their children are older. The ideal moment to provide parenting education, much of which is focused on imparting bare survival information, may have been presumed to have passed.
To some extent, the primacy of educational and parenting goals reflects the short-term nature of these programs. As discussed above, although most of these programs do not adhere to the crisis model, which assumes the period of pregnancy to be the critical period for intervention, time constraints on the period of program participation have forced programs to essentially create a hierarchy of needs and to focus on those at the base of that hierarchy. One program, for example, had hoped to focus a substantial amount of its efforts on job-skills training. It could not do so because of the very limited academic skills of program enrollees. Consequently, the program has focused much of its efforts on the acquisition of minimal reading and math skills.
A staff member in one of the few programs that permit teen parents to remain in the program as long as they wish had thought a good deal about the issue of time. She had concluded that the most sensible approach for teen parents is to focus on short-term goals with the aim of accomplishing longer-term ones one step at a time. In her program, this can be done within the program structure. In most, the program is forced to focus on the short-term goals and hope that the longer-term ones have become sufficiently inculcated that the teen mother will pursue them later, either on her own or in the context of another program.
As we expected, the community-based programs have more diverse enrollee populations than the school-based programs. Diversity includes both enrollee age and school status, with enrollees in the community programs older on average and likely to be school dropouts. Higher average age is because only one of these programs includes junior high school aged teen parents, as some school-based programs do, and because some require that the teen parent be a school dropout. Dropouts rarely move directly into a program. Often, staff indicated, several years go by before program involvement is sought.
In general, the closer the community-based program to the schools, the more the program's enrollees resemble the school-based program population. The closeness of the match is best illustrated by the enrollees of one program included in Secs. 2-3, which provides child care on the site of a voc-tech center to teen parents who attend the collocated high school. Since the program provides only child care, and only to those teen parents attending regular school, program enrollees differ from other teen parents only in that they are unable to find child care elsewhere. (Of course, this may imply that they receive less family support, are living independently, or are married.) In contrast, in one program supported with welfare funds, enrollees must have left school, and some are well past school age. In another program located in a housing development, enrollees are eligible for services if they live in the project. Thus, enrollee age and past and present school involvement vary enormously.
The school-based programs that we visited devote little or no attention to issues of recruitment and retention, as discussed earlier. Indeed, most of the emphasis in this area is on monitoring adherence to often strict attendance requirements. When asked about recruitment, most program staff pointed to long waiting lists as the reason why recruiting was not done.
The community-based program approaches differed, in some cases substantially, from this approach. Many staff recognized that unlike the schools, they could neither take enrollments for granted nor assume that enrollees would stay in the program once enrolled. In addition, several programs had a goal of involving young mothers who would not normally become involved. Consequently, they devoted considerable resources and thought to recruiting and satisfying enrollees. One program employed a full-time recruiter. A second extended full-time child care services to all program participants, even though most program activities did not require a full-time commitment. Program staff believed that this extra child care--which allowed mothers to shop alone or just be alone--constituted an important program benefit for women who could not afford sitters.
In this same program, a drop-in center dedicated to teenage mothers had been established to provide a place for young mothers to go who could not or would not begin a more structured program. The hope was that through the center, some teen mothers would progress to the formal program. But staff recognized that some teen mothers simply would not. These mothers, staff believed, would simply benefit from coming out of their apartments and meeting their peers. Considerable effort had been devoted to making the drop-in center really attractive and inviting; weekly lunches, a washer and dryer, a large play room, and an on-site coordinator increased its appeal.
The three "pure" programs provide a wealth of services to program clients. One program, which uses the case manager model, attempts to provide whatever enrollees need through links with existing community services. The other two programs provide comprehensive services--education, counseling, job skills, training, and guidance--through the program.
All of the programs located in the community provide more--and more intensive--educational services than they had originally intended. The educational emphasis expanded in each program because enrollees lacked the basic skills necessary to benefit from the training opportunities that formed a major component of each program's original plan. In one program, for example, the job-training component requires 6th grade reading and math skills, so the program began to emphasize remedial work at the 5th and 6th grade reading level. However, it soon became apparent that most enrollees could not benefit from these efforts: They needed classes targeted to 0-4th grade level. Said one program director, "When we drafted the proposal for the program, we set goals that we wanted them to achieve. But once the program was up and running, the first group of goals went out the window--we went down to basics!"
Getting down to basics involved efforts to integrate some job-skills training into the basic education classes that enrollees needed so badly. Staff hoped that such integration would hold the interest of enrollees who were attracted to the program as a means of obtaining job skills. They feared that a steady diet of remedial education would lead to wholesale defections, particularly as more and more enrollees tested at below 4th grade level in basic skills.
Program staff everywhere agreed that such integration is laudable but difficult to achieve, particularly if the program is time-limited. Time limitations, combined with strict definitions of positive program outcomes in some programs, make it difficult to devote the resources to remedial education that many enrollees need. In one program, for example, job placement (even in a minimum wage job) was a positive program outcome, but enrollment in a community college was not. Said a case manager in this program, "I often wonder if we are doing these kids a service. What they need is to be able to get into a community college and be really competitive. It might take four years (of remedial work) to get them to that point, but then they'd be able to make it. However, that would be considered a negative program outcome (in her program). On the other hand, a welfare-dependent, minimum wage job is considered a positive program outcome."
School-based programs are to some degree constrained in terms of the nature and extent of the services that they can offer by their location and their institutional support. As discussed by Zellman (1981), school staff may resent any extra resources directed to teen parents, believing that they should be directed instead to students who have not compromised their potential through their own behavior. Moreover, schools are constrained by their public nature: The programs that they sponsor must avoid controversy. This mandate is of particular importance to programs serving teen parents, which may be controversial by their very nature. In addition, schools generally get into the business of serving teen parents through individual advocacy, not through institutional commitment: Few districts view services to teen parents as a primary mission. In many school districts, the teen parent program represents the district's sole response to teen parents (Adler, Bates, and Merdinger, 1985; Zellman, 1981).
In some contrast, community-based programs have generally taken on the mission of serving teen parents voluntarily. Once a commitment is made to serve this clientele, such organizations may have a clearer mandate to do what it takes to serve them well. Several community respondents noted, for example, that their organizations had changed their menu of services and mode of service delivery several times in response to teen parent feedback. In one program, for example, teen parents are accorded three educational options, each of which is popular with a particular group. Staff in this program noted that their program was special in that they did not stop with one "solution," but instead offered alternatives designed to suit the needs of very different teen parents. They contrasted their wide range of services with the limited options available to teen parents through the schools in their community. One respondent observed that in the schools, there is rarely a search for the best solution, nor are efforts usually made to provide several options; typically "a" program is set up and offered, and those teen parents who cannot use it simply do not.
Community-based organizations appear to be less constrained than schools about the use of funds and personnel. Said a staff member working in one of the smaller community-based programs, "We don't have (school) administrators looking over our shoulders all the time." Staff contend that less-intense supervision enables them to provide more services in more unique ways than school-based programs. Staff in a number of the programs that we visited reported that in contrast to the school-based teen parent programs in their communities, they are encouraged to innovate and to modify program structure and services as needed. For example, in one program the location of child care provided by the program was changed when staff discovered that enrollees were choosing not to use it because of its location on an adult school campus. Teens were uncomfortable with the older and heavily foreign (English as a Second Language (ESL) student) population. In another program, staff were able to quickly increase the number of GED slots when it became apparent that enrollees needed more educational services than first anticipated. In this case, good links to other community-based services and the fact that the program was not obligated to provide the service itself (as the schools might be) allowed this to happen quickly. In another program, staff believed that they had the freedom to operate the program pretty much as they saw fit. They described an instance that for them illustrated the constraints imposed by school involvement. In the course of their class on preparation for birth, the teen parents in this program had become very interested in what happened to babies who were stillborn. They asked if they could visit the morgue. When, as required, program staff asked for permission from the school district for the trip, they were told that such a visit was not on the list of approved field trips in the district. Staff noted that if the schools had not been involved in the program, they could have taken the girls without any problem.
A number of staff in community-based programs noted that their independence from the schools permitted them to both expand the range of their services and to make the kinds of "life style" suggestions and interventions that would not be possible in the school context. For example, one program had recently expanded its scope to include housing services for teen parents who were not welcome in their family homes and who could not afford or could not maintain an apartment of their own. Two programs had begun classes for grandparents, an idea that several school program staff had advanced, but which they could not accommodate in their school-based programs for one reason or another. In several programs, frank talk about birth control and family planning accompanied referrals to planned parenthood and other agencies.
Community-based programs are also more likely than the schools to attract the support of volunteers, who can dramatically expand program opportunities and resources. In one program, a local executive had single-handedly taken on the role of male mentor to the teen mothers, many of whom had never had a caring older man in their lives. Another program, part of a larger community organization, expected to reap considerable benefit from new efforts to organize a 400-member volunteer support group, some of whom would raise funds and devote time directly to the program. Finally, networking with other community agencies brought a range of professionals (e.g., nurses, family counselors) into several programs.
As discussed above, we endeavored to select programs with a strong vocational education and training focus. This focus did not, however, translate into readily accessible vocational education in many cases. In five of our seven community-based programs, vocational education opportunities are located exclusively off-site. In two of these programs, there is no transportation available; in a third, the program provides tokens for public transportation to vocational education settings. In the two programs without vocational education access, staff were fairly comfortable with that situation. Most believed that vocational education was or should be a secondary concern, given the very limited academic skills of program enrollees. These staff clearly saw vocational education as coming later in their enrollees' lives, after a diploma or GED, and in fact they worried that if vocational education became too important, it might represent a diversion from school completion.
As discussed in Sec. 3, even when vocational opportunities are available, they may not be used by teen parents. In the context of school-based programs, we found that vocational education was much less likely to be used if the opportunities were located outside the program, even if the program was collocated with another program that provided vocational education services. We speculated then that leaving the program imposed costs on teen parents that they were unwilling or unable to shoulder, including time on buses, difficulties in coordinating their schedules, and the need to mix with nonparenting students.
Although we expected that these costs would hold as well in community-based programs, we thought that because enrollees are typically older, they might be both less reluctant to mix with nonparenting peers and more work-oriented. Indeed, in those programs that provide services to teen parents of varying ages, staff noted that it was the older teen parents, aged 18 and above, who were more interested in and enthusiastic about vocational education.
Nevertheless, as shown in Table 4.2, a pattern of vocational education use similar to that found in the school-based programs appears to hold in the seven community-based programs we visited as well. When vocational education is available on-site, many enrollees participate in it. Co-site vocational education attracts fewer enrollees. And when the only opportunities are available off-site, participation is low, even when transportation is available.
| Level of Enrollee Involvement | ||||||||||
| Location of Vocational | ||||||||||
| Education | No. of Programs | None | Some | Most/All | ||||||
| On-site | 2 | 2 programs | ||||||||
| Co-site | 2 | 1 program* | 1 program | |||||||
| Off-site | 5 | 4 programs*** | 1 program | |||||||
NOTE: Each asterisk indicates a program discussed in Secs. 2-3. | ||||||||||
As in the school-based programs, when employability is a clearly specified program goal, the likelihood that program enrollees will participate in vocational education is enhanced, as shown in Table 4.3. Our findings suggest that a clear employability goal may increase vocational education and job-training use in one of several ways. One way may involve how the program is evaluated. In two programs, a funding source required the articulation of such a goal and indicated that program evaluation would be based at least partly on job placement rates. In these programs, staff perceive that they have made a commitment to employability and encourage enrollees to make decisions to enhance this goal. Despite concerns that employability goals might undermine educational ones, staff actively encourage vocational education and work to reduce any obstacles to vocational education enrollment. It may also be that programs with clear employability goals attract enrollees who have made a personal commitment to job-skills training and employability, thus supporting the goal.
| Employability Goal | |||||
| Use Level | Yes | No | |||
| No use | 2 programs** | ||||
| Some use | 1 program | 1 program* | |||
| Most/all use | 3 programs* | ||||
NOTE: Each asterisk indicates a program discussed in Secs. 2-3. | |||||
Employability goals may also gain support when program staff themselves choose them. Such staff support depends to a considerable extent on perceptions that there is sufficient time to provide enrollees with both job and educational skills. Such a condition existed in just one program in our sample. Here, enrollees could complete a GED or diploma, then begin job training, all under the aegis of the program within a case manager model. This program had no time limit, so choosing employability as a program goal was not perceived to compromise other goals that staff believed had to be achieved first, especially educational ones. Employability could both be a longer-term goal for teen mothers and remain a program goal.
The more time-limited programs did not have this luxury. Given a short time frame for each enrollee, staff in most programs believed that employability goals would have competed with educational ones. Since staff agreed that education had to come first, employability goals were not endorsed and vocational education was not encouraged.
Although community-based programs are generally begun with a somewhat different purpose than school-based ones, these programs have been forced to duplicate to a considerable extent what the schools do: provide educational programs in the service of academic skills development and school completion in a time-constrained program context.
As a result, the community programs do not differ from the school-based programs as much as one might expect. All have a significant educational component, which in some programs constitutes the major program element. At the same time, they are different. For one thing, they serve dropouts. Dropouts motivate programs to be responsive and inviting, since participation is voluntary. Staff are aware that enrollees, having dropped out once, cannot be assumed to be committed.[47] Some programs attempt to recruit clients, an activity unknown in school-based programs. One program in our sample even set up operations in a public housing project to "get them where they live."
More freedom to innovate helps community-based programs to serve a less-captive audience. Fewer rules and constraints and more community resources enable some programs to house program enrollees and engage substantial numbers of community volunteers in fund-raising and program operations.
Despite older enrollees and an impetus to promote economic self-sufficiency, vocational education is not the major thrust in these programs. In most cases, short time frames and educational deficiencies combine to compel an educational emphasis similar to that found in the school-based programs. However, in programs with a strong employability goal (backed up in some cases by funder evaluation requirements), vocational education was used to a much greater extent. These findings, combined with those in Sec. 3, suggest that vocational education use is enhanced by both the accessibility of vocational education services and program commitment to it as a major and measurable program outcome.
Such commitment to vocational education and employability is usually there at the outset in most community-based teen parent programs, but it is often diluted by the need to serve what are perceived to be more fundamental needs within a constrained time frame. Consequently, most programs adopt an implicit sequencing model, in which the program focuses limited resources on education and parenting. Employability skills training is encouraged but not actively pushed.
This sequencing notion of vocational education deserves attention, as it emerged as well in the school-based programs, where at least some staff regarded vocational education as more of a threat than a benefit to many school-aged teen mothers. It may well be that job-skills training is too much for a young mother who is barely literate, as staff frequently argue, but deferring vocational education to "later" is an inadequate response when later means "on your own" with no program support. Articulation with programs that can be begun once school goals are met, concrete career planning, and some attention to the possibility of integrating academic and vocational education opportunities within these programs are ways to help teen parents acquire both academic skills and credentials and job-related training, whether one adheres to a sequential or integrative model of skills acquisition.
[45]Because of the shortness of our visits, we did not interview any program enrollees.
[46]Those who support the obtainment of a diploma argue that, although the GED may be faster, it is less valued by employers. Indeed, the military services will no longer accept the GED in place of a high school diploma.
[47]In JOBS-funded programs, lack of attendance may be sanctioned by reductions in welfare benefits, as discussed in Sec. 5.