Educational Evaluation and Shifting Youth Policy

Social programs, including interventions helping disadvantaged youth, offer implicit models regarding what behavioral changes will cause various social and economic outcomes. Responding, in part, to the work of evaluators, federal and state youth policies advance different intervention models. This article reviews five causal metaphors running throughout youth employment and education programs: (1) The functionalist economic model, arguing that increased skills will improve youth employment; (2) the institutional socialization model, suggesting that earlier entrance to the "adult work world" will ease youth "transition"; (3) a psychosocial view of youth development, emphasizing the individual's sense of social efficacy in learning and work situations; (4) the subcultural model, pointing to the importance of local opportunity structures and social norms functional within specific subcultural conditions; and (5) a self-determined community development vision, urging local economic growth in disadvantaged areas. Evaluation evidence, increasingly abundant, should begin to look across these models to improve program strategies. A review of such research for youth employment efforts is included. When feasible, evaluation sponsors and evaluators should explicitly articulate programs' causal models to nurture broader theoretical understandings and minimize being overly confined within the immediate program model one is evaluating.