A summary of the study is available from L.A.’s BEST.
Students who attend L.A.’s BEST, an after-school enrichment program in Los Angeles, are less likely than nonparticipants of similar backgrounds to drop out of school, a study has found.
The study—conducted over four years by the University of California, Los Angeles’ National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing—compared nearly 6,000 students in grades 6-9 who participated in the program with 6,000 students in the same grades in the Los Angeles Unified School District who did not participate. The study showed that the students in L.A.’s BEST were 20 percent less likely to drop out.