Social Change Powered by Data

“You used to be a fun guy, talking about all the cute kids you were helping. Now, all you do is talk about data.” Geoffrey Canada jokingly referred to comments from friends, who noted the transformation in his behavior as he created an important new model for education: the Harlem Children’s Zone.

You might have seen Geoff in the American Express commercials on TV, or in the recently-released movie, Waiting for Superman. His approach to using information represents a new version of the old aphorism, “What gets measured, gets done.” Meaningful measurement can motivate, guide, and enable everyone who works on improving the lives of our children to understand what’s going right and what’s going wrong with the education of those children.

Harlem Children’s Zone has created what they call “a new paradigm for fighting poverty.” It has five core principles:

• · Serve an entire neighborhood comprehensively and at scale.
• · Create a pipeline of support. Provide support that starts with prenatal programs for parents and finishes when children graduate from college.
• · Build community among residents, institutions, and stakeholders, who help to create the environment necessary for children’s healthy development.
• · Evaluate program outcomes and create a feedback loop that cycles data back to management for use in improving and refining program offerings.
• · Cultivate a culture of success rooted in passion, accountability, leadership, and teamwork.

The emphasis on outcomes, data, and the use of information for continuous improvement reminds me of the visit I had with Dr. Beverly Hall, the superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools. As she told the story, two ingredients for her successful reform of those schools are: (1) making sure that everyone – from the teacher’s aide and the cafeteria worker to the principal and associate superintendent – understands his or her role in educating the system’s children; and (2) using data at all levels to set goals, monitor performance, and continuously improve outcomes (by improving every step that everyone takes toward meeting those outcomes).

Our Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood includes a unique and powerful approach to promotion of children’s success through community organizing, which builds upon data. Neighborhood residents, both adults and youth, designed a community assessment, to understand the needs of the neighborhood’s children and their families. Powered by that information, six Solution Action Groups, totaling 120 or so residents and experts, will identify how this community can support children’s success in school and in life, “from cradle to career.”

Challenges exist in Saint Paul, some of which Geoffrey Canada faced in Harlem, some of which he did not. One challenge, for example: of the 8,500 children 18 and younger in the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood, barely a few hundred attend schools in the neighborhood. So, the approach to improving their educational achievement is not as simple as creating something at an existing site and expecting that it can help most children in the neighborhood. We will look at solutions which can address all children, some of whom are too young yet to attend school. Another challenge: organizing resources. We will have to produce significant community change without expecting that financial resources will increase. In fact, they might decline. Our approach will build upon the ingenuity of an empowered neighborhood to identify how the formal systems of education, health, public safety, and human services can realign, along with the community systems of families, friends, and neighbors, to create a new environment that supports our children.

Data powers all this: the data from our community assessment; data on educational performance; other data on community conditions. Data will provide the raw material for helping us determine where we want to go, how we will get there, and whether we have arrived.

More on the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood, as time goes by. For now, I hope I’ve made clear how sound, credible information, placed into the hands of community residents and others who care about the well-being of our children, can fuel a process of highly productive community organizing, to improve the success of the neighborhood’s children in school and in life.

Comments? Please let me know.

Interested in learning more about the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood? Check the web site:

http://www.wilder.org/promiseneighborhood.0.html

Interested in joining a Solution Action Group? Take a look at the description and the application on the website.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Promise Neighborhood - A Promising Prospect

Why did the federal government give the Wilder Foundation a half million dollars for a Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood? Don’t Minnesotans already reside in the land of great promise? National publications often tout our state as one of the best places to live. Why do we deserve this grant?

On many indicators, of course, we do quite well. However, troubling signs exist. Students in some of our schools do very poorly in reading and math. (Actually, the students in very many of our schools do not do well in math.) In some of our neighborhoods, a third or more of all residents live below the poverty line; too many children live in poverty. The trend data show clearly that large proportions of our younger generation – the people who we hope will grow up and continue the success of this state, in work, in civic life, and in family life – lack the academic skills they should have.

The Promise Neighborhood model provides a cradle-to-career framework for developing a set of supports that will enable a neighborhood’s children to succeed in school and in life.

That’s why we applied for and received a Promise Neighborhood grant – to work with one community to organize its strengths and mobilize existing resources for the benefit of its children. Based on what we learn, hopefully all neighborhoods can become neighborhoods of great promise.

Where is the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood? The Promise Neighborhood encompasses a 250-block area in the Summit-University and Frogtown neighborhoods in Saint Paul, which includes two public elementary schools, Jackson and Maxfield. Nearly 40 percent of the residents are younger than 18. Two-thirds of the residents live in poverty; eighty-two percent of students are eligible for free lunch.

What’s happening over the next 12 months? The Department of Education selected us as one of just 21 communities in the nation to carry out a “planning year.” The year includes a community assessment, lasting several months – shaped by neighborhood residents themselves – to understand all the characteristics of the neighborhood and the needs of the children and families. With the assessment in hand, we will bring neighborhood residents together in “Solution Action Groups” with educators, child development experts, and service providers to develop the best possible approach to supporting the neighborhood’s children. Finally, we will secure commitments from organizations to collaborate to provide cradle-to-career educational, family, and community resources and supports.

What happens after the planning year? If the planning year accomplishes its goals, then by summer of 2011, we will have constructed a network of organizations that will collaborate to provide services in the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood. This, of course, will include the school district and the two public schools in the neighborhood.

How will we know if this all works? If successful, the first thing we should see – just a year or two from now, is that every child, even before birth, becomes a focus of community attention. Parents receive parent education. Infants and toddlers have access to health care and if they have health issues, these get addressed early, before those issues start to have negative effects on the child’s development and readiness for school. Preschoolers receive good care when their parents are working, possibly from child care providers, possibly from family, friends or neighbors. They develop in an environment in which they learn their numbers and abc’s, so that all of them, not just those with better incomes, can move ahead faster in kindergarten and elementary school.

In not too many years, we should see better school performance. While achievement tests do not measure everything, and we cannot focus solely on test scores to measure success, we should see reading and math scores rise, reflecting greater achievement among children living in this neighborhood.

Momentum has developed already. More than 30 adults who live in the community have completed the second of three meetings to shape the assessment. About 20 young people have had their own meetings for the same purpose. We’ve received calls from volunteers and from organizations who want to take part in the initiative. Our Project Director, Hamilton Bell, is actively reaching out to all who want to be involved.

I’ll have much more to say about this as the year progresses. I expect to learn a lot, and to have a lot of fun, managing this initiative. It has the potential to help us not just on 250 blocks, but throughout this region and our entire state. Stay tuned. If you have comments or suggestions, please let me know.

CSI is re-engineering how government works

A CSI role for the Executive Director of Wilder Research? That’s correct. Something more important, though, than a mere role in one of the most popular television dramas of all time. Rather, an opportunity to shape the future of our state.

The Commission on Service Innovation launched its efforts last month, to provide the Minnesota legislature with a plan to re-engineer how government does its work. Over the coming months, we will ask: What quality of life do we want to create for our state over the next 20 years or so? How can we best shape government to support the creation of this quality of life?

Responding to these questions has more challenges than immediately meet the eye. State and local governments operate mostly in ways that fit the 20^th century. Until recently, they have usually benefitted from reasonably adequate sources of revenue to do so.. The 21^st century presents a different landscape. National and international environments have changed. The state’s residents have a different social makeup; they hold different preferences and expectations.

Economic and demographic trends, at state, national, and world-wide levels, have created a situation unlike anything that Minnesota and its regions have experienced before. For instance, globalization has established a new playing field for business. Economic forces and competitive trends throughout the world have as much relevance as the trends and competition locally. (Competitors that Minneapolis business people need to watch don’t live in Saint Paul, or even in Wisconsin. They live in places far away.)

The aging of our population will present challenges and opportunities unlike anything ever seen anywhere in the world. For some counties and regions of the state, the “old-age dependency ratio” has begun an upward trend that will result in one person over 65 for every two persons “of working age.” What does the change in this ratio mean? It means that, for every person who is likely to be retired, we used to have four or five people in the labor force, receiving paychecks and paying taxes. Now, we will only have two or three. You can see very quickly how the burden on those workers will increase.

The state faces severe revenue shortfalls in the foreseeable future. Government must work smarter and more productively, as one of several steps to compensate for those shortfalls.

At the same time that these social and economic challenges have arisen, we have changed in other ways. Technology has created opportunities to organize work more creatively and efficiently than in the past. Communication with, and engagement of, the population can occur in new and powerful ways. Younger generations especially (but not exclusively) have come to rely on online access to resources, services, and information; for them, the use of social media has become second nature, whereas it might have seemed like science fiction even just 25 years ago. People of all ages expect 24/7 access for retail purchasing, banking, travel reservations, and other functions that previously could occur only in-person or by phone during much more limited times of day.

These changes in our circumstances and needs make it imperative to produce innovation in the ways that we serve ourselves through government. I look forward to creating a small but hopefully significant product that will help to shape the future of our state; and I look forward to doing so with colleagues on the Commission from business, from foundations, from employees’ unions, from education, from government, and elsewhere. It’s a rare opportunity to bring great collective expertise into the same group to move ahead boldly and creatively for the benefit of our state’s residents.

Immigration, the Need for Rational Discussion

Why have we witnessed the recent upsurge of commotion and concern about immigration?

A few facts deserve mention.

First, just about everyone on this earth is an immigrant or a descendent of immigrants. Virtually all land masses have received their human populations from elsewhere. It’s just a question of how long ago that occurred. I recently visited the Museum of Natural History in New York. If you’ve visited, you have probably seen the very impressive map which shows the flows of people, from continent to continent, beginning in Africa thousands of years ago. Even our American Indian people, the most native of any of us on this continent, descended from tribes who originated far away.

Second, a century ago in Minnesota, the proportion of our population comprised of immigrants far exceeded the current proportion. For example, the “non-native” residents of Minnesota made up 26% of the population in 1870; they made up 20% in 1920. Immigrants built Minnesota as we now know it – not just the urban Twin Cities, but the many cities, towns, and communities throughout our state, which contain streets, roads, and places often named in commemoration of distant homelands. During the 1980s and 1990s, the proportion of residents born in other countries reached its lowest point (about 2-3%). Today, immigrants make up about 8% of the state, and are a growing proportion of many areas of greater Minnesota.

Third, hostility toward immigrants is nothing new. Jews arriving in New York City from Europe in the late 1800s experienced frequent disdain from existing city residents. “Chinatowns”, which now attract tourists, served in many cities as protective enclaves from intense persecution of Chinese people. The Know Nothing movement of the mid-1800s spawned a national political party unsympathetic to immigrants. In Saint Paul, Swedes, Irish, and others initially faced much discrimination when they first arrived. Swede Hollow of the 19^th century exemplifies a situation of immigrants living in squalor due in large part to discrimination.

The Arizona law has prompted much of the most recent, visible controversy. In truth, I sympathize with anyone in Arizona who has suffered as a result of criminal activity perpetrated by illegal immigrants, or for that matter by citizens and legal immigrants who profit from the drug trade, for example. However, illegal activity should not define the debate. I don’t generate my opinions and recommendation for the health care system, based on the behavior of bad doctors; or for the legal system, based on the behavior of bad lawyers. We can’t let illegal behavior cloud our sight and damage our ability to understand trends and develop creative visions for the future.

In any case, the Arizona hullabaloo will pass. Underlying discomfort, often not outwardly expressed, plays a larger role. Why this discomfort? Why – especially if we all can point to our immigrant heritage – do we encounter a lot of tension in our communities related to immigration?

I’ll offer my interpretation; you may have your own. I would suggest that different members of our communities become uncomfortable for different reasons. Some people hold dear an “ideal” conception of life as it once existed. (In fact, such idyllic life probably never did exist, but that does not matter.) They witness different cultures, see institutions change, and wish for “the good old days.” Some have the concern that new arrivals will take their jobs and/or increase the demands on government service systems. Other people simply fear change and resist change; any change makes them uncomfortable. For other people, racism or xenophobia impedes their capacity to think and act. For others, a combination of these and other factors explains their reactions.

Rational discussion – based on current context, short-term perspective, and long-term perspective – must prevail. Trying to change or resist the patterns of migration, established over thousands of years, is equivalent to trying to change ocean currents or the tides. It can’t be accomplished in the long term. Indeed, it should not be accomplished. These patterns are neither good nor bad; they are simply reality. In the shorter term, we need to recognize that businesses need employees for production and consumers for consumption. Our communities need active, caring members; they need families with good parents. Individuals and families who arrive in Minnesota, whether from New York or New Delhi, offer today, in the 21^st century, opportunities for the state to thrive – just as offered by those many Minnesota immigrants of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries.

To promote rational discussion, we presented a webinar, which you can view – to hear about how immigration is changing the current Minnesota landscape. It contains information, along with commentary from three community leaders from throughout the state. More important, you can see the larger body of information about immigration, on which the webinar is based. Go to www.mncompass.org Click on the immigration tab.

As always, we welcome your questions, comments, and suggestions.

Homelessness -- Can we "cure" it? Should we care?

In Minnesota, a state blessed with resources, should we have 13,000 or more people who are homeless, nearly half of whom are under age 21? What if we could solve the problem for a thousand homeless people, at a cost of $1.75 per year, per state resident? I know that we want “no new taxes”, but might such an investment have some value?

Minnesotans can take pride in the fact that we have initiated efforts to end homelessness. Without such efforts, we would likely find ourselves in a worse situation. However, as Wilder Research has reported, many homelessness trends have moved in a bad direction.

Is this issue intractable? Is the cost of a solution insurmountable? I performed some “back of the envelope” calculations to help think about this.

A portion of the homeless population just needs housing. Some low-income, low-skilled adults fall into this category; so do some women and children fleeing domestic violence. With a place to live, they can handle their lives without intense supportive services, and just with the normal sort of assistance that all of us need at significant transition points in our lives.

What might housing cost for 1,000 homeless people, who need no special supports beyond housing? Assume a housing cost of $750 per month per person. Calculate the total yearly cost; divide it by the number of residents in the state of Minnesota (5,446,420). You will discover that we could house 1,000 homeless people – who just need a place to live – for a cost per year of about $1.75 per state resident.

Many homeless people, of course, require supportive services; they cannot live on their own. Suppose that supportive housing costs $1,500 per month. Do the math again. You will discover that we could house 1,000 homeless people – who require supportive housing – for a cost per year of about $3.50 per state resident.

Is that an insurmountable cost? Not really. Although I do realize that resources are finite, and if you use the “just pennies a day” formula with every possible good thing to spend money on, eventually resources will exhaust themselves. However, the will to do something may have greater importance than the amount of available resources.

Homeless people must have the will to improve their life situations. Many of them have that will. They have the same desire and drive as anyone can; they pursue exactly the same goals as middle and upper income people. Yet barriers get in their way, including low income, severe mental illness, poor credit histories.

In addition to these individual barriers, structural barriers create place severe limits on what people can achieve. What do we mean by structural barriers? Very simply, if 110 people needed housing, but only 100 places were vacant, 10 people would not have housing, regardless of their abilities and determination.

Analysis by one set of economists** suggested that just a small increase in the vacancy rate (an economic structural factor) can produce a major decrease in rates of homelessness in a community. Why? Well, understandably, a greater number of available units, in combination with likely rent reductions, will enable some low-income individuals and families to afford housing.

So, as we seek to end homelessness, our strategies must focus on both structural and individual factors.

What does it cost us if we do not address homelessness? Well, homelessness increases chronic health problems; homeless teens have much lower graduation rates than do other teens. Again, you can do some math. In the Wilder Research 2009 survey, 42% of homeless adults had used a hospital emergency room during the previous six months. At $1,000 or more per visit, costs add up. National data suggest that the cost of not receiving a high school diploma averages $260,000 over the course of a non-graduate’s lifetime. (Remember, the individual incurs those costs, but so do all of us in the form of lower productivity, lower tax receipts, etc.)

The Family Housing Fund found that “the cost of supportive housing for a chronically homeless family is less than half the cost of public services required if they remain homeless.”

We can make choices; we do have resources. We can make a dent in this problem, if not solve it.

A recent study in the sporting world showed that penalty kick takers in soccer matches score their point 92% of the time when the score will produce an immediate win for their team; but they score their point only 60% of the time when the point will simply tie the match. That shows the power of psychology. Might we take a similar approach to social policy? If we feel we can succeed, if we have that will, we produce a much greater likelihood of success.

I encourage you to take a look at the results of the recent research on homelessness on the Wilder Research web site, www.wilderresearch.org.



**“Homeless in America, Homeless in California”. Quigley, Raphael, Smolensky. The Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2001.