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Does abstinence education work?
UWM professor studying the contentious issue
By Dan Polley
As a sub-grantee of several different grants, Peter Maier and his staff help create abstinence education curriculum and compile data to evaluate how it is working for several educational institutions.
Maier, associate director for research services for the Center for Urban Initiatives and Research, is currently overseeing four projects funded by four different grants. The projects help evaluate how abstinence educators use lesson plans to teach teenagers ages 12 to 18. Most who go through the program are ages 12 to 14.
“Our job is to evaluate what’s there,” Maier says.
The programs are financed mostly through federal funds, which means that educators are restricted from teaching about contraceptives unless they also teach about failure rates of those contraceptives, Maier says.
That’s putting “all the eggs in one basket,” Maier says.
Maier says the center first started to evaluate the programs through a sub-grant from the now-defunct Opportunities Industrialization Center of Greater Milwaukee. The grant lasted from July 2003 to June 2005.
Maier and his staff have assembled an abstinence education curriculum and help compile an online database that allows those teaching the abstinence curriculum see how their use of the curriculum is being effective and monitors how they use the curriculum in teaching their students.
One of those educational entities, Rosalie Manor Community & Family Services in Milwaukee, is a non-profit social services agency that helps family and community development. The manor has been using abstinence curriculum, which was revised about four years ago, since 1986 — about the time Maier came on board, says Dawn Groshek, director of development at Rosalie Manor.
The manor uses the entire curriculum with after-school programs at about five schools during the year, she says. The manor works with about five other organizations in the city that also use the curriculum, she says.
Rosalie Manor educates between 150 and 200 with the full 59-lesson curriculum per year, Groshek says. Another 200 receive a shorter curriculum and yet another 3,000 receive one-time presentations, she says.
“Youths like it because the educators we hire make the curriculum fun. Parents like it because kids are getting good information, correct information and it helps builds kids’ characters,” says Groshek, who has been working at Rosalie Manor for about 10 years.
Since Maier’s compilation of the curriculum data is now in its third year, he says he should have a better idea of whether the program is successful. One of the questions Maier is looking to answer is whether you can delay the onset of sex for more than one year through abstinence education.
One of the questions surrounding abstinence education projects like the ones Maier compiles data of is whether the education is successful in keeping teens abstinent until marriage.
“That’s something we’ll never ever be able to observe,” he says.
Maier says that with the new round of funding, there may be terms attached that would require compilation of data from more post-curriculum focus groups.
Educational institutions in 25 communities in 15 states use the database that Maier and his colleagues have set up.
Maier is currently collectively funded by about $170,000 a year through the five different sub-grants. He says the next round of funding is scheduled to be decided sometime in the fall.
He has submitted four different proposals for the next wave of funding and is “definitely getting one and definitely not getting one.”
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