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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > April > 28 > Entry
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
Comments
By sprice
May 4, 2006 1:08 PM | Link to this
The advice my highschool class received in 10th grade on success was “You have many aspects to your life, school, school activities(sports, band etc), work and social life. Pick two and you will be successfull.” I agree with this completely so school + part time job is fine and will probably improve grades. School, football, and job will lead to poor performance somewhere, most likely grades for most kids.By Tracy W
May 3, 2006 6:10 PM | Link to this
I don’t believe that “Only in the U.S. is part-time work widespread among high school students” When I was at school in NZ it was extremely common and widespread, at least by the senior years at high school (when we were also sitting the big external exams). My cousins in Australia also had jobs while at high school. I think someone has not been doing their fact-checking. Makes me wonder about the rest of the paper.By Lea
April 28, 2006 4:22 PM | Link to this
Sometimes it can be just the opposite. I worked the “closing” shift in my junior & senior years, and got better grades somehow… Perhaps because my job taught me responsibility? But I agree about the extracurricular activities. My daughter WAS in cheerleading last fall, and the coach had the audacity to put ON PAPER that homework was not an excuse for missing practice (which was 3 hours a day 5 days a week). My daughter actually was happy one night when I had to work late and couldn’t take her to practice - she slept. It’s my opinion that a reasonable job is a great idea. Extracurriculars are fine as long as they are not more demanding than school!By Dave
April 28, 2006 2:08 PM | Link to this
Scott, your observations on the benefits of a job are valid. But in my brief teaching career, I had quite a number of students who honestly had to work to help keep food on the table and buy shoes so their little brothers and sisters could go to school. So they work every evening and weekend and still have a couple of hours of homework to do each night because “we must have high expectations” and they have trouble staying awake in class. As a teacher, what can you do?By Mary
April 28, 2006 12:54 PM | Link to this
This discussion seems to be a debate on which came first - low expectations of students or low expectations of teachers. Missing from the discussion are the humongous hours schools keep some kids tied up in extracurricular during the week and on weekends, widespread sleep deprivation among our youth and their parents, time stressed parents and students, etc. My son had a paper route for 6 years. It was my way of getting him away from video games and exercising on a regular basis. I did not tell him that. He looked upon the route as a way to buy expensive video games. It worked for both of us. School extracurriuclar activites seemed much more obseesive to me on time requirements and more intrusive into our family life than either of my children’s part time jobs. I started to discourage their extracurricular participation and thought jobs were teaching them better values and responsibility. However, fast food jobs, paper routes, and extracurricular activities can be dangerous, so parents need to be on top of whatever their child is doing.By Oldprof
April 28, 2006 9:52 AM | Link to this
Link to article is not working—website at U. of South Carolina Aiken says it’s not available.