Corporatized Public Service in Harlem

The theme today seems to be schooling. I ran into an article on a Harlem schooling project while looking through Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

The article is quite lengthy. I love long articles, as they tend to be far more thorough. For those who use the link below to read the whole article, I should forewarn you that it is ten pages, or in the range of 3000 words in length.

But to summarize, the focus on the article is on a man named Geoffrey Canada, who is the president of a not-for-profit organization called the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families. Rheedlen provides a network of services for disadvantaged children and their parents in Harlem. Rheedlen's mandate extends geographically in a 60 city block area of Harlem.

Canada's new program combines educational, social and medical services. It starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an entire neighborhood. It operates on the principle that each child will do better if all the children around him are doing better. So instead of waiting for residents to find out about the services on their own, the organization's recruiters go door-to-door to find participants, sometimes offering prizes and raffles and free groceries to parents who enroll their children in the group's programs. What results is a remarkable level of ''market penetration,'' as the organization describes it. Eighty-eight percent of the roughly 3,400 children under 18 in the 24-block core neighborhood are already served by at least one program, and this year Canada began to extend his programs to the larger 60-block zone. The objective is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can't slip through. (click here for the full article, note that NYT requires registration)

The problem, however, is that there that there are political motives behind the structure of the Rheedlen's programs. For one, the Rheedlen's major focus as it goes forward, is the creation of Charter Schools: essentially schools outside the public education system, but still provided with a large helping of public funds in order to operate.

Moreover, a lot if not all, of Rheedlen's structure and organization has been based on business principles. There appears to be a decidedly pro-corporate approach to the handling of problems, and program's success is based primarily on the performance of students on standardized tests, or basically easy to measure data that may not necessarily reflect accurately the health of the neighbourhood Rheedlen operates in.

The business plan that Canada's team came up with proposed a steady increase in the annual budget over nine years, from $6 million to $10 million to $46 million. (This year, four years in, it is $24 million.) The plan reads more like a corporate strategy document than a charity prospectus. It refers to ''market-penetration targets'' and ''new information technology applications,'' including a ''performance-tracking system.'' In practice, too, the organization feels more like a business than a nonprofit, which offers comforting visuals to donors: everyone at the headquarters wears a suit, every meeting starts on time and there is a constant flow of evaluations, reports and budgets. ''Geoff could be a C.E.O. at any S.&P. 500 company,'' Druckenmiller said, and he meant it as a compliment.

Now I want to emphasize that following a business plan, or even operating based on business principles may not be entirely a bad thing for a non-profit. Results count in any endeavor, and figuring out how to measure success in any environment is never an easy process. But the problem with a corporate model is that corporations are structured to always look to the bottom line, and success is based purely on monetary profit.

Money doesn't translate well into people, they are very different animals; and the whole focus of the success of a not-for-profit project is on how it best meets objectives in improving things. In the case of Rheedlen it's all about the children who's lives it's trying to improve.

In the US today there is religious belief in the idea that business models are what work best for anything you want to do. In reality, the only reason this kind of approach has gained preeminence is that public tax-payer money is far less available for social projects. A large proportion, or in many cases, the entire budget of a not-for-profit is dependent on money it can raise from wealthy foundations. These foundations themselves were established by wealthy business men, who fully buy into a business model of success. It did after all work for them.

But, social programs, like public infrastructure, are not projects about making profits. They are projects about improving the lives of the people in the societies where these projects take place. Profit comes later, as the populace makes use of the benefits the projects provide, by creating a more complex marketplace.

While I firmly believe, after having read the article, that the Rheedlen president, Geoffrey Canada is driven to improve the lives of children in Harlem, and that he is using all the means available to achieve some measure of success; I have a nagging problem with the underlying structure of Rheedlen's approach.

Near the end of the NYT article the author, Paul Tough provides the following:

All of which makes skeptics, especially those in the teachers' union, wonder about Canada's motivation. Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that she used to be friendly with Canada, even attending his fund-raisers, until Bloomberg and Klein came into office and started making threatening noises toward her union. ''Since the mayor became mayor, Geoff Canada has stopped having any relationship with us,'' she said.

In her opinion, Canada's new attitude comes down to politics: ''I think what's happened is that they've decided that they'll work with the mayor, and that they won't work with the public-school system except through the mayor and the chancellor'' -- meaning that they won't work with the teachers' union. Canada often speaks of the opposition that his charter-school plan is going to face from the teachers' union and what he calls the educational establishment, but to Weingarten, it's the other way around: it's Canada who is picking this fight, demonizing the teachers' union in order to score political points with the mayor. ''They are working very secretly with the Board of Education and the Bloomberg administration'' on the charter-school plan, she said, a strategy that she said was shortsighted, not least because it is far from certain that Bloomberg will be re-elected. ''If you truly want schools to succeed,'' she said, ''you work with the people who represent the teachers.''

Now unions have their own set of priorities, and they frequently do not mesh with the needs of those they serve. Their focus is on the protection of their members, and in many cases they make a concerted effort to reduce the workload of their members to the detriment of those they serve. This can be especially true in the case of public sector unions used to feeding on tax payer provided funds.

The question should be one of balance. In the case of the project in Harlem, why has government abrogated it's responsibility to properly manage and fund the services needed to raise inner city black children out of poverty and illiteracy? Why can't a public structure create a program that "combines educational, social and medical services", where the entire integrated service "starts at birth and follows children to college"?

Why depend on the tireless effort of one man, specifically Geoffrey Canada, willing to massage the system that exists as best he can to provide some small improvement to the children in the district he has such concern for? His efforts are admirable, and his dedication appears unquestionable, but what comes after him? Clearly Rheedlen depends on his leadership, so what happens when he retires? Historically many not-for-profit organizations begins to fail when the frequently charismatic leader retires or passes away. Who then takes care of the children in Harlem? Or is the only important thing to see the results of business model applied to broad based public service initiatives? And how much of that success, if there is any, is based on business principles, and how much on the dedication of passionate individuals like Geoffrey Canada?

Paul Tough's article ends with a rather poignant and telling scene. It is a public lottery Mr. Canada is holding for the first 180 positions in the initial Charter School Rheedlen is creating:

Finally, at No. 111 on the waiting list, Janiqua Utley's name was called, and her mother rose, took her by the hand and started up the aisle to the backdoor. As workers began sweeping up coffee cups and popped balloons, I sat down next to Canada. He looked exhausted, overwhelmed not only by the evening but also by the enormity of the task ahead of him. His eyes were watery, and as we talked, he dabbed periodically at his nose with his folded-up handkerchief. ''I was trying to get folks to leave and not to hang around to be the last kid called,'' he said. ''This is very hard for me to see. It's very, very sad. These parents feel, Well, there go my child's chances.''

It was a waiting list, I reminded him, that had started him on the path toward the Harlem Children's Zone more than a decade ago -- and now, despite all the millions of dollars, and the staff of 650 and the backing of the mayor, he is still setting up waiting lists. He nodded. ''We've got to do more,'' he said. ''We've got to do better.'' He sighed and looked up at the stage, where Land had just reached No. 150.

I admire the hard work of someone like Geoffrey Canada, who truly wants to improve the lives of others. But basing hope on sparse private dollars from foundations set-up by wealthy men for their own aggrandizement, as much as any desire for public service, is a very hard bargain. It leaves an awful lot of people behind when the party passes, and all that remains are scraps of balloons left by those lucky enough by accident of birth or just dumb luck to attain the helping hand they need.