Moving Forward in Service-Learning Practice in K-12: A Case for Infrastructure

The Learn & Serve America program, as we know it, is being eliminated, and service-learning in K-12 practice will now go through a transition period. As we all know by now, the FY 2011 Continuing Appropriations Act signed into law on April 15th eliminated FY 2011 program funding for Learn and Serve America. This means that the LSA program we have all worked on so diligently over the years is now discontinued. Whether the program will return at CNCS in FY2012, whether federal funding from another agency will support K-12 service-learning, or the national effort grows/stagnates/shrinks will depend on efforts we and others take now and in the near future.

Given the funding cut, it can be easy to get depressed about the future of service-learning in schools, but it is important to keep perspective. Congress eliminated many social programs in the final budget; L&SA, therefore, was not the only program impacted. There were also no public reports or statements about L&SA being ineffective as a program; it was a question of funding and we were an easy target given our grant size and scope and the lack of enough key voices speaking on its behalf.

Learn & Serve America as a program at CNCS may be ending for now, but we must remember that this does not mean that service-learning is “over.” There are too many schools, teachers, administrators, students and community partners out there completing meaningful high-quality service-learning and making a difference for all involved for this movement to disappear overnight. Service-learning is fundamentally important to schools and will always remain viable in education in one form or another.

The question is how we will maintain the infrastructure to support these existing high-quality programs—and help new programs get started--when there is no funding at CNCS to accomplish this? It is not difficult to maintain a service-learning program at a school using grants and community support at a moderate scale. But one isolated program without monitoring can easily devolve from existing best practices to “whatever works” on a given day.

We know that service-learning infrastructure is essential. We know that a state-level presence is essential to define and insure quality, to recruit new teachers and programs, to provide ongoing training and technical assistance and program monitoring, to create opportunities for networking and advocacy, to link service-learning programs to current education policy, to help identify and replicate exemplary efforts, and to ensure that activities are truly service-learning. Research states that service-learning does not necessarily have positive impacts on student outcomes, but high-quality service-learning does. The L&SA-funded administrators around the nation were the primary guardians of quality in the complex K-12 service-learning field; what happens when we are gone?

The potential here is a loss of the many gains that we have made over the last 20 years of service-learning practice. Without state-level support and guidance to sustain the field, service-learning quality will likely erode. It was hard enough to maintain quality with the minimal funding that we received from CNCS! Therefore, in moving forward we need to be clear and concise in our messaging that what has been eliminated was an essential component of maintaining service-learning as a quality instructional school-based pedagogy. Service-learning cannot be accomplished meaningfully without infrastructure to support it. It will devolve into programming of disparate quality and consistency in various school programs around the country; some programs will look like service-learning as we know it, but many will be community service, which is fine but does not result in meaningful student outcomes.

If service-learning is to have an impact on academics, drop-out prevention, school climate and turnaround issues (not to mention on communities that are served) then it must be done in a thoughtful, intentional, and organized way. We need to keep this argument at the forefront of our ongoing messaging about the immediate needs of our field based on the potential for widespread loss of program effectiveness in schools due to lack of infrastructure support.

Javier Betancourt, Florida Learn and Serve