In National Service, It’s Quality, Not Quantity

On September 11, 500 advocates of national-service programs, such as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps, are expected to gather in New York City for the ServiceNation Summit.

Joining the meeting will be the major presidential candidates, Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom have supported significant growth in service programs.

The goal of this meeting is to start a movement designed to increase the number of Americans who volunteer from 61 million annually today to 100 million by 2020. It also seeks to raise the number of full-time national-service participants to one million a year by 2020. Currently, some 600,000 Americans are involved annually in national-service programs sponsored by the federal government, and most, especially in the programs for older citizens, work less than full time.

Those are ambitious and undoubtedly well-intentioned goals. But 15 years after AmeriCorps was created, and more than 50 years after the Peace Corps was started, the case for such a large expansion is thin.

For all the enthusiasm they have inspired among their advocates (of whom, as a former director and chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, I am one), the evidence that these programs are achieving their goals and are worth substantially increased money is still lacking.

Traditionally, two main arguments have been used on behalf of national service — and those same ideas appear in background materials produced for the ServiceNation Summit.

One is that those programs effectively deal with important social issues, like education, poverty, the environment, and public safety (or, for the Peace Corps, development problems in poor countries). The second is that they heighten the commitment of participants to lifelong civic activity, including volunteering, as well as to careers in the nonprofit world and government.

Plenty of anecdotal evidence supports both claims. However, more reliable information is in short supply.

Teach for America, one of the main beneficiaries of AmeriCorps money and participants, has probably invested more than most groups in trying to find out what its participants have accomplished. The results have been mixed. In the most rigorous study, children instructed by Teach for America participants did better on science and math tests (and about the same on reading) than those who had learned from regular classroom teachers. Since the AmeriCorps members had far less training and experience than their counterparts, their success is especially noteworthy.

Nonetheless, other studies of Teach for America have come to different conclusions, and in any case, how much those results can be generalized is doubtful, since participants are carefully selected from graduates of the best universities and colleges in the United States.

That’s not usually true for other national-service programs. To participate in most service programs, all that is required is a high-school diploma, and for the programs involving older Americans, such as Foster Grandparents, not even a diploma is required.

Indeed, national service in the United States (unlike some other countries) is not one program but operates through thousands of separate organizations that receive government support, each of which has considerable leeway in setting its own rules and requirements.

Although the federal government provides money and issues a variety of guidelines, including how to measure results, each group conducts its volunteer efforts in its own way. That makes assessing what national service has accomplished difficult.

Moreover, few evaluations go much beyond measures such as how much work was done or surveys to figure out who participated in the work and what they thought of it, rather than looking carefully at how much of a contribution their efforts made to solve an important social problem.

Thanks largely to a study that has tracked AmeriCorps members who began serving in 1999, better information about how much national service has influenced the lives of participants is available.

At least at first glance, it tells an encouraging story. According to the most recent report, nearly a decade after enrolling in the program, 60 percent of AmeriCorps alumni had embarked on careers in nonprofit organizations or government. They were more aware of issues in and felt a sense of responsibility for their communities than a comparison group of contemporaries who had applied for the program but had not served. This was particularly so for African-American alumni and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

However, it also turns out that by the benchmarks this study is using, those who joined AmeriCorps in 1999, as well as the members of the comparison group, were already highly inclined toward public service.

How much their participation in national service really changed their lives is thus open to doubt. In addition, when the study began, AmeriCorps was much newer and smaller than it is today, with a special intensity to it. The impact of an expanded and changed program on those who joined later, let alone the impact of a program of the size contemplated by ServiceNation, is anybody’s guess.

In fact, AmeriCorps now has 25,000 more members than it did when President Bush took office, a 50-percent increase, while other service programs have expanded or been established as well. In addition, the White House in 2002 added a new unit, the USA Freedom Corps, to promote the president’s call to service, which he made to tap the energy of America’s volunteers after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans volunteering has remained relatively steady during this period. Whatever the effects of national service have been, many factors influence how active a role Americans play in their communities, and government efforts may be just a minor one.

Some organizations, of course, such as Teach for America, are well-known for producing alumni who remain involved in public life, even becoming leaders in their fields. But what generally distinguishes them is that they have high entrance requirements, lots of training for their members, well-defined objectives, and a serious commitment to measuring results.

In other words, what really matters in national service is the quality of the experience, not the number of people taking part, a lesson those attending the ServiceNation Summit would do well to keep in mind.

Leslie Lenkowsky is a professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University and a regular contributor to these pages. He served as chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service from 2001 to 2003. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.