2012 senior class photos
2012 West Carrollton graduation
Home of the Week
Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > April > 28
Friday, April 28, 2006
When teens have jobs, schoolwork suffers
For me it was delivering newspapers after school for five years and later briefly gathering carts from a grocery store parking lot. My wife served Skyline chili until after midnight several nights a week. My colleague Mark Fisher met his wife Julie while they were both working at Wendys.
Many of us had these experiences as teen-agers. The after school job — it’s the American way, an avenue to discovering what work is all about. These jobs are valuable character builders for teens, or so we think.
While I can recall no important lessons from my ill-fated month at the grocery store, I’ll admit that I generally look back fondly on the paper route job. I think I learned some basic principles of responsibility, work ethic and money management — not to mention the valuable skill of emergency bicycle repair.
But could it be that after school jobs are bad for kids, lowering their grades, affecting their behavior and in some cases even forcing teachers to lower their expectations?
That’s the argument from a Cleveland State University professor and a co-author. I was reading their paper about the need for high expectations for schoolchildren (NOTE: I’ve updated this with a new link that works. See below) when I came across a section on the detrimental effects of after school work.
Here are some of the statistics they cited (click through to the paper if you want the citations):
- 26 % of 16-year-old students and 39 % of 17-year-old students worked during the school months of 1996-1998; and, on average, they worked 17 hours per week.
- Most adolescent part-time work is not because of financial need; the higher the family income; the greater is the probability that a teen would work while in school.
- Adolescents spend their earnings for goodies like designer sneakers that their parents won’t pay for.
- Most adolescent part-time work is in the fast-food sector with few skills to acquire or transfer to other jobs; these jobs are filled by adolescents only to meet the demands of the sector through minimal wages.
- Teachers lower their expectations if they have a large number of students working long hours, therefore having a spill-over effect on the overall teaching-learning environment, including those who do not work.
- Part-time work has significant negative correlations with a number of behavioral and academic outcomes, including delinquent behavior, alcohol use, academic achievement and attendance.
- Only in the U.S. is part-time work widespread among high school students; while it is rare in other industrialized countries, where students are only expected to continue their education.
What do you think of those findings? Should our kids be studying instead of slinging burgers? Are these low level jobs part of the explanation for why the U.S. compares badly to other countries on standardized tests, especially our teen-agers?
Update: My original link didn’t work, so I have updated the link so it goes to this site instead. Scroll down to the essay titled, “Setting realistically high academic standards and expectations.”
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
