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.

25 years ago, I took a yellow cab up to Harlem...

I began my teaching career 25 years ago, at a small independent school in a poor neighborhood of New York City. I was twenty-six, I had just moved to New York, and I needed a job. I liked kids, and I wanted to take the summers off while my girlfriend was getting her Ph.D.--and I wasn't yet suspicious of private schools--so I sent my resume out to every independent school in the city. I got two interviews, and I took a job teaching second grade at a small school in Harlem. The school was a small, warm community, and I have very fond memories of the students and colleagues I spent years with. I still don't quite know, however, what to think about the school overall, which now, looking back, seems to have adumbrated some the educational philanthropy boom of the past 20 years--and its problems.  

Since I left Harlem, private money in education has gotten a lot of attention

I moved away from New York City in 2001. Over the past 20 years, there has been an unprecedented influx of private money into education policy, charter schools, and reforms, all ostensibly intended to improve education for children growing up in poverty. Small independent schools, many of them charters, have sprouted in poor neighborhoods everywhere. In Harlem alone, there are now at least twenty charter schools (and my old school itself, bowing to the logic of the situation, has become one of them). These charters are being pushed by boatloads of private money. Over a billion dollars a year is spent on education by philanthropic foundations, much of it by the big three: Walton, Broad and Gates. This private money has gotten tons of attention, but it has not improved outcomes in any meaningful way, as Gates himself has ruefully acknowledged. It is perhaps not surprising that the money hasn't made much of a difference, since while  Bill and Melinda Gates, for example, have spent several billion dollars on education reform schemes over the last fifteen years, that is far less than 1% of what K-12 public schools in the US spend each and every year. Nevertheless, the Gates Foundation's cultural influence is outsized--and mostly, in my view, malign.

Inspired by Paolo Freire and Liberation Theology (but funded by Wall Street)

The school I taught at in Harlem was funded by private donations, and in many ways we were quite well-off. Although the school, housed in a few old rowhouses on a single block in a poor neighborhood, was shabby and poorly equipped by the standards of the public schools in Leafstrewn or Riverside, its physical plant was at least on par with the local public school, and some things about it were really nice. The atmosphere was a bit cramped, a bit shabby, but very homey. The school was small--fewer than two-hundred students from pre-K up through 8th grade--and each class had fewer than 20 students. Each class also had two teachers. This was one of the really big advantages of the school. 

I remember a kid named Messiah who lived in the neighborhood. Messiah was six or seven, and he used to come by and hang out in our classroom, especially before the school year started. He wanted to go to our school, and I think he eventually did-, but for now he was enrolled at the local public school. I was shocked when Messiah told me that he had over 40 students in his class, and one teacher. My class had 18 students, and two teachers.

A very low student-teacher ratio was one thing we could do that the local public school couldn’t (we had a bit more money, our teaching staff wasn't unionized, and there wasn't tons of competition for well-educated young idealists like me). We also sent a fair number of kids to fancy private high schools. We had graduates at Collegiate, at the Darrow school, at Poly Prep, at Columbia Prep, and so on. We also had a nice reading room, run by a reading specialist and staffed by volunteer one-on-one tutors. The reading specialist, Judy, was competent and experienced, and the tutors were kind, smart and dedicated. I tutored in the reading room for a couple years after I left the school--I came in and read twice a week with one of my former students--but I was really unusual: as I recall, I seemed to be the only tutor who wasn’t a middle-aged woman from the rich section of Park Avenue.

This was really the strangest thing about the school: it was a sweet, homey environment that brought together very poor kids and very privileged adults. The wife of restaurateur Warner Leroy (of Tavern on the Green fame) tutored with me in the Reading Room. The head of our development office lived, in a fancy Rockland county enclave, next door to Mikhail Baryshnikov. The chair of the school’s board was born a Vanderbilt; we went up to her country place in Connecticut for our staff retreats. Famous people came through pretty regularly. I got to shake the hands of Tony Bennett and Bette Midler. Some Kennedy ladies toured the school one day. The school’s computer specialist was the son of Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation.

As a young teacher at the school, I always had mixed feelings about the privileged folks who supported the place. On the one hand, the school was a radical experiment whose founder (and head of school) was an inspiring poet and visionary who was constantly quoting Paulo Freire and who had spent most of the days of his adult life warmly nurturing kids in a poor neighborhood far from his own privileged upbringing, and a lot of the individuals I met were really nice. Baryshnikov’s neighbor, Nick, was a great guy who was passionate about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bruno Navasky was very sweet and very smart. On the other hand, the school did not seem all that revolutionary, really. The school was a tiny pet project in a vast sea of poverty and dysfunction. It always seemed to me strange that the rich folks came up to our school, and gave money to our school, when we only served a small, nearly insignificant fraction of the hundreds of thousands of poor schoolchildren in New York. Why were they at our school, when Messiah’s school around the corner needed so much more?

Private Money Is Never Enough to Fix Large Public Problems

I'm going to write some more about this, but the school was a microcosm of the problems that come when private money comes in to try to help poor people:

• First, the money was grossly inadequate to the job, and the model was totally unsustainable.

• Second, the school gave the illusion of doing something about the problem and made rich people into heroes, and so discouraged any change in the larger system. 

This is part of a larger pattern in American life. Philanthropy, while doing some good for particular people, is often bad for American society overall: philanthropy is, while pretty obviously undemocratic, also afflicted with the problems people usually ascribe to government. That is, philanthropy is quite often inefficient, inadequate,  and anti-competitive.

More tomorrow...

Election special: Presidential Prep Schools (Part I)

Our presidential candidates, like most of the US plutocracy, attended private high school.  I'm interested in the differences between the education and literacy of the elite and the education and literacy of the masses, so I spent an hour or so looking at the Presidential prep schools: the Punahou Academy (Obama) and the Cranbrook school (Romney), and another hour or so trying to think about the differences between these schools and public schools.  I find it troubling that our elites are withdrawing more and more from the spheres that the rest of us inhabit, and the private school/public school divide is just one rift among many.  What does this divide look like, and what does it mean?  I'm not really sure, but I've written two posts trying to explore the matter.  This first post is about Punahou and Cranbrook in general, and I'll post something tomorrow about what the schools' English departments say they're doing.

General differences between private high schools and public high schools
These high schools are different from public high schools mainly in their student populations.  The main reason Obama, Romney, Gates and other elites go to private school is that private schools are allowed to exclude kids who are less docile, less privileged, and less able.  Good public schools are mostly "good" because they enroll more docile, privileged and able students, and low-performing public schools are mostly bad because they enroll less docile, less privileged, and less able students. Elite private schools take this difference between "good" public school and "bad" public school to a whole different level, since even at Leafstrewn we don't actively select our students. Punahou and Cranbrook are able to hand-pick their students, and their enrollments are made up almost entirely of extremely privileged and genetically fortunate children (according to an interesting study differences in academic ability among rich kids are at least 50% genetic, whereas among poor kids environment accounts for 90% of academic ability).  At Punahou or Cranbrook, the few scholarship kids, like the young Barack Obama, are rare birds completely unrepresentative of their poorer peers (and Obama was hardly poor).  This hand-picked student body is by far the most important difference between a private and a public school, since students are the most important factor in student achievement at any school, more important than the curriculum, the teachers, or even the budget. .

Non-academic factors also matter
The student population is also important for non-academic reasons, of course. Just as I myself prefer public schools (as a teacher and a parent) for non-academic reasons, many people prefer private schools for non-academic reasons.  Having different populations means that the friends children make are different; the parent population is different; and the culture is different.  But the differences go beyond population.

For one thing, the physical plant is usually dramatically different.  My son goes to public school in a scary, depressing, prison-like structure:
 

Our President and his opponent, on the other hand, went to lushly landscaped academic chateaux.  (Cranbrook's campus, below left, was called, by the New York Times's architecture critic, "one of the greatest campuses ever created anywhere", and Punahou, at right, reminds me somehow of the Hearst castle at San Simeon):

Academic differences beyond the student population
Aside from the populations, and aside from the culture and the architecture and the groundskeeping, these private schools are also dramatically different from public schools in two ways: (1) they have lower student-teacher ratios; (2) they are not bound by governmental curriculum and testing requirements.

The student-teacher ratios at wealthy private schools are dramatically different from those even at public schools in wealthy towns.  The public schools in leafy Bloomfield Hills, where Cranbrook is located, are relatively well-funded, and have extremely low numbers of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch.  While nationwide about 50% of students are eligible for Free or Reduced Price lunch, the number in our own wealthy Leafstrewn is 13%, and in the Bloomfield Hills public schools it's even lower, somewhere between 2 and 8%.  Nevertheless, whereas the public schools in Leafstrewn and Bloomfield Hills have student-teacher ratios of between 11 and 15, Cranbrook has a student-teacher ratio of 8.

Private schools are also not bound by nearly as many government rules.  Punahou and Cranbrook both require standardized tests to get in, and both brag about their SAT results and their National Merit Semifinalists, but neither school subjects its students to the battery of standardized tests that are a yearly disruption of the routine at Leafstrewn and every other public school in the country.  They are also free to run their schools, including their English departments, however they wish--but I'll wait until tomorrow's post to address that.

What do these differences mean?
One thing they mean is that when politicians or billionaires talk about school reform, it is hard for me to take their words at face value.  If standardized testing is so important for improving schools, why don't elite parents push for their own children's schools to give the same tests?  My son went to a private quaker school for a couple of years in between public schools, and he did not take the MCAS.  Malia and Sasha do not have to take standardized tests every year.  Why not? And if class size doesn't matter much, as Bill Gates is so fond of saying, why is it that Punahou and Cranbrook and Lakeside (Gates's alma mater) have dramatically lower teacher-student ratios than public schools do? (In fact the data is pretty clear: as you would expect, class size does matter, and it matters more for poor kids. The chair of Obama's council of economic advisors, Alan Krueger, has done great work on this--see his 2003 article, available here--but Arne Duncan has said that larger classes in high school might be a good idea.)  So in my eyes, neither Presidential candidate has much credibility on education, and both ignore the most important factors in our country's educational health.

Another thing these differences mean is that we public school teachers might look at the curriculum and teaching at private schools, since they probably do things slightly differently.  I've been thinking a lot about how we English teachers can learn from looking at doctors, at literature, at homeschooling, at international differences, and so on; prep schools are another interesting outside comparison. So tomorrow I'll say something about the way the two Presidential Prep schools say they handle reading, and I'll say which candidate I would vote for if all I knew was their high school's English department mission statement.