Problems with Philanthropy: Scalability

In the 1990s I worked, first as a teacher, then as a reading tutor, at a small independent school in Harlem. The experience was great in many ways--I loved my colleagues and my students--and it was only years later that I started to see the school, wonderful as it was, as representative of many of the problems with philanthropy in general: inefficient and inadequate, and unable to be scaled up to solve the problems it was addressing, it nevertheless gave the elite, powerful people who funded it and directed it the illusion that they were doing something revolutionary. That second problem--the illusion of efficacy--I'll leave for another day. Here I want to address the most basic issue: the school's model was unscalable, because it depended entirely on the school's being small and elite. 

Unscalability of Raising Money

I remember a joke in a classic movie about a couple who looks like they “probably met by answering an ad in The New York Review of Books.” Our school, too, sometimes seemed like a joke about the intellectual preciousness and insularity of New York intellectuals and elites. In the early years of the school, back when it was still a pre-school, its founder raised money and sought help by writing public letters to the editor in the New York Review. One of the letters, titled, Help Wanted, read: “We need teachers of poetry, music: We need teachers of poetry, music, history, foreign language, English, composition. We need doctors, lawyers, people skilled in the art of good and inexpensive cooking. We need artists and sculptors. We need folk to share their skills, vision and hope with the people.”  A letter from 1968 described the school as a “a place of peace, wonder, variety, joy and intellectual possibility,” and then asked readers to send money. 

Over the years, as the school grew, it had to modernize its fundraising operations. By the time I worked there, the school was running a full-time development office, and it had to spend a surprising amount to get its money. The last time I looked, the school had a budget of about four million dollars, but its management and development expenses were a bit over a million dollars. In other words, the school had to spend a million dollars raising money in order to get 3 million dollars to spend on education. This is a pretty bad deal, and you certainly wouldn’t want to scale it up to the level of all of New York City. New York City public schools spend roughly as much per student as our school, but they do not spend another 30% above that on fundraising.

Government is actually very efficient at some things. Collecting money is one such thing. The IRS budget is something like .03% of the Federal budget. (Distributing money is another thing the government does efficiently, and governmental antipoverty operations like the EITC, WIC, and TANF, are way, way more efficient than any charitable organization--but that’s another story). Collecting taxes is really cheap and easy, but raising money privately is relatively expensive, difficult, and inefficient--and, even more importantly, there just isn’t that much private money to go around.

Unscalability of Sending Students on to Fancy Prep Schools

Like its fundraising, much of what the school did just could not be scaled up. One of the selling points of the school was that it sent a lot of students to fancy private high schools--Darrow, Columbia Prep, Collegiate, etc. This was a well-deserved benefit for the individual students who went to these schools, but there just aren’t nearly enough spots in fancy private schools to take all the deserving poor kids who would like to go to them. Our kids went to these schools because our school developed relationships with the prep schools--partly, no doubt, because our board members and volunteers already had relationships with these prep schools, sending their children there or having gone there themselves. Having a few poor kids go to school with a lot of rich kids is nice for both the poor kids and the rich kids, but there is only room for a few poor kids, since one of the main functions of private schools is to be selective about their student populations.

Unscalability of Staffing

Another wonderful thing about our school was its reading room. Judy and Barbara were wonderful, and the volunteers were wonderful. But there just aren’t enough wonderful rich volunteers out there to staff all of the reading resource rooms in all the public schools in all the poor neighborhoods in the country. Most public schools have to make do with paid aides.

How much the reading room tutors get paid is one issue; another is how much the classroom teachers themselves get paid. Teachers at our school are making much, much less money than they could make elsewhere.  This is one reason we could have two teachers per grade. Miranda, my co-teacher, and I together cost the school less than a very experienced teacher could have made teaching in the city’s public schools. We were willing to do it partly because we were young and inexperienced, partly because the school seemed exciting, warm and humane (I liked it that the head of school went around hugging every child and telling them they were marvelous), and partly, perhaps, because the school was so full, not only of characters (every school has those--Joyce, the cook, who was from the islands and was going to set me up with her friend the literary agent, Rubin, the gym teacher, who shared with me his love for the books of mega-pastor T. D. Jakes, Luis, the handyman, who kept the place going, and many others), but also of privilege--the English gardener who came around weekly to work on our backyard; Barbara, the second-in-command in the Reading Room who was ABD at Columbia and who later graciously hosted me at her weekend estate in Columbia County; the Danish artists who lived in Harlem and sent their kids to the school (the only two white kids in the place, as I remember); Elspeth, the pre-K teacher who was Dwight MacDonald’s daughter-in-law; the headmaster who talked about Isaiah Berlin as if Berlin were his bosom companion. In any case, there is no way there will ever be enough good teachers willing to teach poor students for very little money. Whenever there’s a teacher shortage (this year, for instance), it’s always worst in places with poorer kids and places that pay less money. Our school was able to overcome these disadvantages and get decent teachers, but again, it was benefiting from being unusual.

Nothing about our school was scalable

In its ability to attract teachers who would work for low pay, in its ability to attract donors, in its ability to attract volunteers, and in its ability to place its graduates in fancy prep schools on scholarships, our school could only work on a very small scale. There just isn’t enough of that stuff (philanthropic money, cheap quality teaching, good volunteers, prep school scholarships) to go around even in its one small poor neighborhood of Manhattan, let alone in other poor neighborhoods in Manhattan, let alone in the many poor neighborhoods of the four other boroughs of New York City, let alone in the hundreds of other impoverished towns in New York State, let alone in the whole country.

It wasn't scalable, but it gave the illusion of scalability--and that was the problem. The rich donors felt like they were heroes, and felt like they were actively doing something--which almost no one, unfortunately, feels when they pay their taxes. But dealing with the donors' feelings is a story for another day.