"Are you all rich?" (Problems with Philanthropy, Part III)

One of my most vivid memories of the school I taught at in Harlem was when some rich white ladies came to my classroom. I forget who the ladies were--probably the wives of somebody or other, certainly past or future donors to the school (donors came through pretty regularly). Given their clothes and handbags, the ladies were very obviously of what we later called the 1%. Kathleen, the wonderful pre-K teacher who was guiding the ladies on their tour introduced them to my third graders, and asked if the kids had any questions.

Mischievous DeShawn Williams, a child whose irreverent wit made me smile every day, raised his hand. Kathleen, the Pre-K teacher, said, "Yes, DeShawn?" and DeShawn asked the ladies, “Are you all rich?”

There was a brief moment while his question rang in the air.

Then the ladies tittered uncomfortably. I laughed. No one knew what to say. 

No one knew what to say, because no one wanted to make the obvious, simple answer: Yes, these ladies were rich. Of course they were rich. Unlike some of my students, who would wear the same clothes to school for days at a time, they were dressed rich. Like most people who came through the school, they were visiting because they were considering making a donation. So why did they all hesitate to answer the question? Why were they embarrassed by their good fortune? That’s a deep question on which we can only speculate. What’s certain is that they didn’t say anything, and their tour guide had to jump in and answer for them. 

Her face turning a bit red, her smile getting bigger and, to my eyes, less genuine, Kathleen said, “No, DeShawn, they’re not rich.”

I remember DeShawn’s impish look of skepticism and disbelief (then again, he often had that kind of a look).

After asserting that the obviously rich ladies were actually not rich, maybe the pre-K teacher felt she had to clarify, to explain herself. “They’re not rich,” she said. “They’re… well-off.” 

This seemed like gibberish to me, and I think we all still felt a little uncomfortable; maybe that’s why Kathleen went on:

“You see, Deshawn, they went to school, and to college, and worked very hard, and saved their money--and… you can do that too!”

She no doubt meant this to be a message of uplift. There was no one at the school I admired more than Kathleen; she was present to the children at all times, engaged in their lives, working for their betterment. And if it’s arguable that her answer was actually fine, especially given the context, it still made me uncomfortable, partly exactly because of the way the context seemed to have dictated the answer. But the main problem, of course, was that her answer was so transparently false. The ladies in the room might have been hard workers, but their hard work was almost certainly in no meaningful sense the reason for their being rich, especially not in the sense that DeShawn meant it.

I wonder what the school’s founder would have said in the same situation. A poet who had worked for years as a young man in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, who was full, in his phrase, of “the fury and the passion of revolution,” he railed in his books about “the cruel power elite.” But, ironically, he was dependent on this same elite for the money to operate his school. He probably wouldn’t have said exactly what Kathleen said, but he was the only one at the school who could have gotten away with saying something even close to the truth. (1)

Kathleen’s response to DeShawn not only implicitly blamed the parents of the children before her for their own poverty, it also absolved the larger society from any responsibility for the inequality that was visibly present in the classroom. You could argue that this explanation could work to empower the students (“Work hard, and you too can be well-off!”), but it seems more likely to have made the students feel worse about themselves. In any case, my guess is that this explanation was not made for the sake of the students. Instead, Kathleen’s real audience seemed to be the rich ladies themselves. And this was the real problem. I am pretty sure the rich ladies did not come to Harlem to have the vast gap between their own privilege and the lives of the children of Harlem pointed out to them, even if their very presence pointed it out to the perceptive children. The rich ladies did not come to Harlem to think about the root causes of inequality and poverty. Instead, the rich ladies came up to Harlem, and were greeted in Harlem, as benevolent, disinterested saviors. But if you don’t talk about inequality and justice, if you don’t talk about structural racism, if you don’t talk about massive changes but only talk about small changes, nothing big will change.

In any case, for me, the morals of the "Are you all rich?" story are many, among them:

• Children always see through our BS, even if they don't always know what to make of it;
• Inequality is uncomfortable to everyone involved, but it's better to be honest and open about it;
• If individual private citizens are funding a school, they should they should not be paraded around through the schools like visiting royalty--but really they should probably not be in the business of funding important societal functions, like school, at all!
• Because the problem with philanthropy isn't only, as per Giridaradhas (2), that donors are self-serving, it's that philanthropy erodes democracy.

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Footnotes:

(1) Our school was distinctly different from its present-day successors: the KIPPs and the Success Academies of the world believe that the best way to eliminate poverty is to change the poor people themselves, because the main injustice in our world is that poor kids are not educated well enough, while our school believed, I think, that the poverty and injustice were the problems, and that while school could help to heal the wounds of poverty and injustice, the world needed a revolution. There were problems with this, obviously--the founder of the school was a complicated guy, but he was always vulnerable to accusations of having a white savior complex, or worse--but the school really did try to be, in his words, a "community of healing." Unfortunately, by choosing to grow the school, its founder set it on a path that would require more and more money. In order to get this money, the school had to “beg” beyond the pages of the New York Review of Books; in fact, it had to go to the elite levels of technocratic New York business and finance. By relying on this funding source, however, the school was putting itself at the mercy of the establishment, and it simply could not continue to be a place of revolutionary peace and love. The year after I left, the founder was forced out by his board of trustees, and now, less than twenty-five years later, the school is run by people without any teaching background who have aligned themselves in their language (data-driven rigor!) with education reform: They've taken both "children" and "school" out of the institution's name. It's now an "Academy," and according to the International Journal of Progressive Education, the school is now "centered on heavy discipline and traditional instruction."

(2) Anand Giridaradhas's book, Winners Take All, is great, but I wish he had focused a bit more on the ways philanthropy is anti-democratic. I'll probably write about that a bit next week.

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...