In his 20s, as a Teach for America fellow in a Washington, D.C., classroom, Nick Ehrmann, found himself reading Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Little Blue Engine,” which satirizes the well-known kid’s story of the Little Engine That Could who repeats, “I think I can, I think I can,” to power its way up a steep hill. In Silverstein’s version, instead of reaching the summit, the train slips backwards and crashes: “If the track is tough and the hill is rough, / thinking you can just ain’t enough!” the poet writes. Ehrmann took the lesson to heart and, after completing graduate work in sociology at Princeton, founded the educational nonprofit Blue Engine, its name a nod to the poem.
As CEO, Ehrmann takes the hard look at the shortcomings in our nation’s secondary schools, rejects pat inspirational messages and instead provides students with critical support to succeed in higher education. Blue Engine’s most important innovation is the introduction of teaching assistants (known as BETAs), mostly recent college grads, in the classroom. By breaking up large classes into small groups, teaching assistants personalize lessons for class performance and learning styles. With 89 BETAs in seven schools today, the program has been shown to nearly double the number of college-ready students — a 73 percent increase at three schools, according to New York’s 2013-14 Regents test data — and cut the number of failing students by one third.
On a recent weekday morning, Ehrmann, wearing a scarf against the 34-degree chill, plopped down at a table at Au Bon Pain in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. NationSwell spoke to him about rethinking the education sector, leadership and fatherhood.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
There’s an expression that we have here that we have to earn the right to do this work. I think there’s a pervasive illusion that the fact that you have good intentions is going to lead to positive outcomes. And in actuality, it can lead to feelings of entitlement and arrogance and a lack of partnerships — true partnerships — in the communities in which we work. So from the minute we step foot into the office or to a school or to a classroom and sit across the table from a young person, who are we to say that we deserve to be there? We have to earn the right to be there in the eyes of young people, teachers, parents and each other. That’s number one. It feels like that’s the most grounding way to honor the work and not lose sight of what’s most important, which is achieving results.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Number one is broadening the evidence base in how we define success, continuing to embrace academic achievement outcomes, but also incorporating measures of student growth, social-emotional learning, learning climate and the ways that schools can and must nurture the growth of young people more holistically. Students aren’t just data points. They’re people, and I think we’re seeing a really reductionist narrowing of what success means into standardized test scores at the expense of things that help young people grow and learn and develop independently in their lives. I think the pendulum is swinging back.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Dude, I have like 5,000 books. Hmm…
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
I have three boys under five [years of age]…we’re watching “Cars 2” and “Wall-E” for the 14th time, and actually, I just watched the Star Wars trilogy — the original three — with my four-year-old, and he was glued to the set. It’s just amazing.
What’s your biggest need right now?
Sleep! No, I think I’ve got it: a relaxation of the assumption individual organizations can or should scale to solve social problems alone and to encourage the essential forms of collaboration in systemic partnerships, where the most promising organizations become part of a much broader theory of change in how problems get solved. Look at Malaria No More, for example. There was no single organization that would have set themselves up to become the global malaria response. Too often, I think, entrepreneurs face pressure to scale to the size of the problem alone.
What inspires you?
Working with an incredible team. Having the chance to be part of an organization that sees the strengths in young people, instead of their weaknesses and deficits, and builds from that strength without taking credit for it. And the sliver of possibility that this work is going to have a dramatic impact on how students learn across the country.
In turn, how do you try to inspire others?
It’s easy to lose sight of what drives us and unites us as an organization, when the work itself is so hard. And part of my role is to consistently hold that vision and sense of possibility, just grounded in young people, to hold that front and center, so we can recharge.
What’s your perfect day?
I thrive on routine. I’m just going to describe my current day. A perfect day: I’d say it starts with not waking up three times in the middle of the night, step one. Step two: Cook breakfast for my boys. Get in a quick run in Central Park. It’s equal parts being in the field at schools and managing teams. Getting home in time so that Annie [my wife] and I could put the boys to bed. And eking out 36 minutes of “Homeland,” before I fall asleep on the couch. #LivingTheDream.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I was a musician for most of my life. I come from a family of musicians. I play cello, so I grew up doing classical and jazz ensemble work most of my life. I miss it. That would be part of my perfect day, if I had the time. I started around [the age of] four and put it down in my early 20s.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this work?
To not to apologize for thinking big. And to not allow caution or fear to limit people’s sense of what’s possible.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.
Tag: low-income children
Meet The Educator Who Accurately Predicted Technology’s Potential to Transform Student-Driven Learning
Elisabeth Stock founded PowerMyLearning, a national nonprofit that leverages technology to transform teaching and learning in low-income communities, in 1999 — a time when the cloud was still in the sky, the search engine Google was only a year old and most still logged on via a dialup connection. Even then, Stock saw software’s potential to boost students’ learning, but she didn’t want to replace classroom teachers with lessons on a screen; instead, she wanted the technology to strengthen the learning relationships among students, teachers and families. Today, Stock points to growth in math proficiency (and great gains amongst children with learning disabilities) at PowerMyLearning partner schools across the country compared to similar schools.
NationSwell sat down with Stock at the organization’s offices in the Garment District of Midtown Manhattan and discussed her outlook on leadership, learning and racing a Chevy Impala with her dad.
What’s the best advice you’ve received on leadership?
There’s this expression of the mirror and the window. What really strong leaders do is this: when things go right, they look out the window to see who they can give credit to. And when things don’t go well, they look in the mirror, and say, “What did I do wrong?” Really lousy leaders do the reverse. When things go badly, they look through the window and ask, “Who can I blame?” And when things go really great, they say, “Oh, look at me! I’m so great!”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I’m very excited about how the technology is becoming much more user-friendly for teachers to do data-driven instruction and support student-driven learning. I also think we’re at a particularly exciting moment in time because the prevalence of cell phones and smartphones in the inner city has gotten really high, which provides the ability to combine texting with other things we’re doing to help parents stay in the game with their kids’ education.
What’s on your nightstand?
It’s depressing. You really want to hear it? I’m reading “When Breath Becomes Air,” which is a book about a young doctor [Paul Kalanithi] who gets diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and decides he’s going to write a book before he dies. And then the other one I always have is “Thinking Fast and Slow,” [by winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daniel Kahneman].
What’s your biggest need right now?
PowerMyLearning is in the process of developing our national board. Finding people who want to get involved in our work and will bring their networks, hearts, heads and wallets — all those pieces that will help us get better — is probably our number one need.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first started this job?
The key thing is to surround yourself with good people and to surround yourself with people who really believe in what you’re doing. You may meet somebody who has the best skill set for what you’re looking for, but if that person is not super excited about what you’re doing, it’s not worth it to bring them on board. They don’t have to work the same hours as you, but they have to be as committed and passionate as you.
What inspires you?
The thing that inspires me is this really strong sense of unfairness that exists, that if you are born in a certain zip code, you have different outcomes than someone else. It just seems, to me, so wrong, and I’m very driven to change that.
What’s the accomplishment that you’re most proud of?
I think it’s two things. We’re all about developing the capacity of people, so I’m very proud of helping teachers become better teachers and helping parents know how they can be more helpful for their kids at home, and then, seeing my staff do the same thing. We have people on staff who have been here for a long time and seeing them grow and develop is just so rewarding. If you can do that, you can do anything. All these other things we’re trying to make happen (like kids having better academic outcomes and socio-emotional learning), will happen if capacity is developed.
What’s something that most people don’t know about you?
Growing up, my father was a psychiatrist, so you’d assume that he’d be this kind of quiet, docile, glasses-wearing kind of guy. As my mom described it, she married Clark Kent but got Superman. The other side of my dad was that he was really into car racing. He could not wait until I turned 16, so I could start racing with him. He started me off taking the Chevy Impala out on weekends to race around cones in a parking lot, and eventually I graduated to a real track going 100 mile per hour on the straightaways. I think that my interests in how things work physically (I studied biomechanical engineering as an undergrad), a lot of it came from my dad.
What does your perfect day look like?
Every day is a perfect day. I don’t complain a lot. I mean a perfect day is when everyone is healthy and putting in their all, including my kids and my husband. You go home and everyone’s happy, and at work, you’re strengthening your own relationships. I’m not going to say it’s a day where you hear about some big grant or we get state test results back and our kids have done well, because those are just easy days. Those aren’t necessarily the best days. The best days are when you work hard, right?
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.
The Zero-Energy Way to Produce Food, How to Build Hope in a Poisoned City and More
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth
On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation.
Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report
In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair.
Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change
A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics.
MORE: Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead
The Impoverished Often Choose Between Buying Furniture and Food. This Group Makes Sure They Have Both
Dr. Mark Bergel hasn’t slept in a bed since 2008. But thanks to his efforts, many of his neighbors have.
While volunteering at a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that delivered meals to impoverished residents, Bergel noticed that many families lacked enough beds for all of a household’s residents — or they didn’t have any beds at all. Learning that many of those living in poverty forgo basic furnishings in order to put food on the table, he started A Wider Circle.
The organization’s largest initiative, Neighbor-to-Neighbor, accepts donated furniture and distributes it to low-income residents across the Washington, D.C., area. A Wider Circle also operates the new Wraparound Support program, which enlists up to four volunteers to focus on one individual or family as they seek to rise out of poverty.
Watch the video above to see why Bergel sleeps on his couch and how A Wider Circle is making life better for almost 16,000 adults and children each year.
MORE: As Extreme Poverty Increases Nationwide, This Texas County Finds the Secret to Drastically Reduce It
How One Local Government Intelligently Invests in Local Business, A City That’s Keeping Housing Affordable for All and More
Berkeley Votes to Boost Co-op Economy in the Face of Gentrification, YES! Magazine
The co-op already thrives in Northern California. But in an effort to keep locals in the area (which has an extremely high cost of living), the city council in Berkeley, Calif., is throwing even more support behind the model. Similar to initiatives already passed in New York City; Madison, Wisc.; Cleveland; and Richmond, Calif.; Berkeley’s move provides tax incentives, support for worker-owners and financial aid to small businesses — making it easier for co-ops to become powerful job generators.
The Miracle of Minneapolis, The Atlantic
The Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., metro area has a higher median household income than New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago. Despite the Twin Cities’ wealth, affordable housing remains in reach for most residents. Unusual plans that encourage rich neighborhoods to share tax revenue with middle class and low-income residents — a move referred to as “fiscal equalization” — means that the American Dream is alive and thriving in Minnesota.
Giving Students What They Really Need, Bright
No matter how good a school is, a child’s learning suffers when he or she is subjected to chronic stress. But schools often add to or ignore kids’ anxiety and tension, instead of teaching tips and strategies to diffuse it. Turnaround for Children* is teaching social-emotional skills, such as stress management and self-regulation, in the classroom, enabling all kids (namely low-income ones and those that suffer from abuse or neglect) to be high achievers in an academic setting.
*Editors’ note: Pamela Cantor, founder of Turnaround for Children, is a NationSwell Council member.
Emphasizing Learning over Memorization, This Group’s Students Achieve Life-Altering Success
Eric Eisner is that teacher you feared, the instructor who set high expectations and believed his students would push themselves to meet them. He praises success, but doesn’t shy away from criticism. Maddening as the workload could be, he was the teacher whose class you appreciated most, since the challenge gave you a better sense of your own capabilities. Tough love, some might call it. “I’m rough, I’m abrasive and blunt,” Eisner says of his teaching style. “The thing in the jungle that bites.”
Eisner has no formal background in education. He came to it, by chance, as a second career. After graduating from New York’s Columbia Law School in 1973, he crossed coasts and entered the glitzy entertainment business in Los Angeles, working his way to the top spot as president of the David Geffen Company. Big paychecks bought a home in the city’s western hills, paid for his kids’ private school tuitions and allowed him to retire in his late forties.
Looking for a way to occupy his time outside of improving his golf game, Eisner was persuaded to get involved in a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, a low-income, predominantly Hispanic area. (It took some coaxing: “I had time, but I lacked the inclination to give it,” he confesses.) Eisner recalls not knowing what he could do for the families the nonprofit helped, but he wanted to meet the children to find out what made them tick. Partially, this was self-serving — he wanted to better understand his own children, whom he was losing in “the battle to pop culture” — but he also wanted to know why kids weren’t learning in school.
The roundabout answer to those questions led to the founding of Young Eisner Scholars (YES) in 1998, a group that took the “smart kids” out of regular classes for biweekly lessons on debate and language, helped them transfer to private, high-performing high schools and mentored them through college graduation and their first jobs.
YES has mobilized $50 million in financial aid and scholarships to fund its scholars’ tuition and underwrites college tours, application fees, summer programs and medical bills beyond a family’s budget. All that capital seems to have paid off. The scholars come from neighborhoods where two-thirds of students drop out of high school, but YES’s participants have been accepted to top-tier universities and won prestigious awards like the Fulbright, QuestBridge and Gates Millennium scholarships.
Eisner admits that YES was never founded with a long-term vision in mind. Instead, the group pivoted as they learned more, reacting with the critical thinking Eisner wants to see his kids develop. The program has found success in urban Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, and this school year, it’s testing its worth in four schools in western North Carolina. (The expansion into Appalachia drastically increased the number of white children participating in YES.)
Justin Hicks, YES’s Appalachia program coordinator, says he spends much of his day in the car, driving 45 minutes to each school on one-lane switchbacked roads. A graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Hicks pitched the idea for a rural version of YES during his first phone interview with Eisner. In this role for less than a year (previously, he was an intern with the organization), Hicks sees cultural differences in what these children hope to be — youth saying they want to be carpenters and farmers when they grow up, instead of lawyers or doctors — but he doesn’t see a difference in their ambition, the way they learn or their intellect. For now, the program is waiting to see if children from rural backgrounds will express interest in attending first-rate schools far from home, like their first-generation immigrant, urban counterparts.
An essential part of YES’s strategy and the way Hicks runs his classrooms is with an emphasis on language. Typically in schools, children are judged by how they perform on tests. If they score well, they’re considered to be smarter. But once Eisner started prying into how much his students actually comprehend, he realized that they were often memorizing answers that would later appear on exams, rather than learning concepts.
In hour-long sessions during the school day, YES reverses the “I, We, You” model (the teacher demonstrates, the students practice with her aid, the kids do homework alone) into something closer to the Socratic method. There’s no instruction without student participation. In math lessons, this means that there are no equations, only word problems like “If two trains, 56 miles apart, leave stations at the same time…,” although the instructors often deliberately leave out the question. When learning vocabulary, flash cards are practically banned, because Eisner says, they often define words using other terms the kids barely understand. Instead, YES sessions involve personal discussion and debate over contemporary issues.
While its students are thriving, Eisner’s answer might not be a scalable solution to our nation’s failing public schools. For one, YES requires huge sums of cash, which bars it from assisting more than a few dozen students in any given city. And troubling for some is the fact that YES plucks only the best students — the talented tenth, to use W.E.B. DuBois’s words — out of the public school system, leaving the most troubled students behind.
Eisner, for his part, would agree with DuBois about elevating the most exceptional students from low-income backgrounds is a way to bring along the rest of the class. He updates DuBois’s 1903 essay with a modern spin. “We are an advertising agency for educational aspiration. The fact that a kid goes to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Columbia, there’s a little perfume that goes with them when they come home from school. It might reach a friend or cousin,” he says. “We succeed when these kids become glamorously successful.”
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That
10 Outstanding Solutions of 2015
In a year when policing controversies, mass shootings and debates over immigration have dominated the headlines and discourse, there’s a group of inspirational pioneers at work. Not all of these individuals, policy makers and entrepreneurs are household names, but they all are improving this country by developing new ways to solve America’s biggest challenges. Here, NationSwell’s favorite solutions of the year.
THE GUTSY DAD THAT STARTED A BUSINESS TO HELP HIS SON FIND PURPOSE
Eighty percent of the workers at Rising Tide Car Wash, located in Parkland, Fla., are on the autism spectrum. Started by the father-and-son team of John and Tom D’Eri, Rising Tide gives their son and brother, Andrew, who was identified as an autistic individual at the age of three, and its other employees the chance to lead a fulfilling life. John and Tom determined that the car wash industry is a good match for those with autism since they’re more likely to be engaged by detailed, repetitive processes than those not on the spectrum. [ph]
THE ALLSTARS THAT ARE TACKLING SOME OF AMERICA’S GREATEST CHALLENGES
The six NationSwell AllStars — Karen Washington, Eli Williamson, Rinku Sen, Seth Flaxman, DeVone Boggan and Amy Kaherl — are encouraging advancements in education and environmental sustainability, making government work better for its citizens, engaging people in national service, advancing the American dream and supporting our veterans. Click here to read and see how their individual projects are moving America forward. [ph]
THE INDIANA COUNTY THAT HAS DONE THE MOST TO REDUCE INCOME INEQUALITY IN AMERICA
The Midwest exurb of Boone County, Ind., has reduced the ratio of the top 20th percentile’s earnings compared to the bottom 80th percentile by 23 percent — the largest decline for any American county with more than 50,000 residents and an achievement stumped county officials. NationSwell pieced together the story of how a land battle and a statewide tax revolt altered the course of Boone County. Find out exactly how it happened here. [ph]
THE TESLA CO-FOUNDER THAT’S ELECTRIFYING GARBAGE TRUCKS
Ian Wright’s new venture, Wrightspeed, is far less glamorous than his previous venture creating luxury electric sedans. But Wrightspeed, which is installing range-extended electric powertrains (the generators that electric vehicles run on) in medium- and heavy-duty trucks for companies like the Ratto Group, Sonoma and Marin counties’ waste hauler, and shipping giant FedEx, could have a greater impact on the environment than electrifying personal vehicles. Click here to learn how. [ph]
THE ORGANIZATION THAT IS TURNING A NOTORIOUS PROJECT INTO AN URBAN VILLAGE
Los Angeles’s large, 700-unit public housing development Jordan Downs consists of 103 identical buildings. Entryways to the two-story beige structures are darkened with black soot and grime, and the doors and windows are crossed with bars. Soon, the dilapidated complex will be revitalized by Joseph Paul, Jr., and his outreach team from SHIELDS for Families, which provides counseling, education and vocational training services. Read more about the plan, which calls for recreational parks and retail on site and would double the amount of available housing with 700 more units tiered at affordable and market rates. [ph]
THE HARDWORKING GROUP THAT’S RESTORING THE SHORELINE OF AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER
Chris Pallister and his small, devoted crew are leading the largest ongoing marine cleanup effort on the planet. Since 2002, Pallister’s organization, Gulf of Alaska Keeper, has been actively cleaning beaches in Prince William Sound and the Northern Gulf Coast. The nonprofit’s five boats, seasonal crew of 12 and dozens of regular volunteers has removed an estimated 2.5 million pounds of marine debris (mostly plastic items washed ashore from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) from more than 1,500 miles of coastline. [ph]
THE STATE THAT’S ENDING HOMELESSNESS WITH ONE SIMPLE IDEA
Utah set the ambitious goal to end homelessness in 2015. As the state’s decade-long “Housing First” program, an initiative to place the homeless into supportive housing without any prerequisites, wraps up this year, it’s already reduced chronic homelessness (those with deeper disabling conditions, like substance abuse or schizophrenia, who had been on the streets for a year or longer or four times within three years) by 72 percent and is on track to end it altogether by early next year. Read more about the initiative here. [ph]
THE RESIDENT THAT’S REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS’S MOST DEVASTATED WARD
New Orleans native Burnell Cotlon wants to feed his 3,000 neighbors. So he’s turned a two-story building that was destroyed by catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (along with most of the Lower 9th Ward community) into a shopping plaza. Already, he’s opened a barbershop, a convenience store, and a full-service grocery store in a neighborhood that has been identified as a food desert. [ph]
THE MAN THAT’S GIVING CAREERS TO UNEMPLOYED MILITARY VETERANS
“They had our backs, let’s keep the shirts on theirs” is more than just a motto for Mark Doyle. It’s the business model on which he built Rags of Honor, his silk-screen printing company based in Chicago that provides employment and other services to veterans. In the three years since its inception, Rags of Honor has grown from four employees to 22, all but one of whom are veterans at high risk of homelessness. [ph]
THE PRESIDENT THAT’S PRESERVING OUR ENVIRONMENT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
After promising to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal our planet during his 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama has faltered on environmental legislation during his first term, preferring to expend his political capital on the Affordable Care Act. But the 44th president’s use of regulatory authority and his agreement with China likely ensure his place in the pantheon of modern environmental champions. Here’s why. [ph]
This Exciting Program Moves Struggling Students to the Head of the Class
The statistics are troubling. Only about 16 percent of students in Harlem pass the New York State English Language Arts exam. And just 31 percent of children across New York City pass it. But one group is changing that.
The Reading Team, a Harlem-based literacy organization, is working to make children who are at high risk of reading failure active and excited learners. And it’s finding success: In 2015, 80 percent of Reading Team children passed the New York State English Language Arts exam.
How are they doing it? By making literacy relevant to every activity. Watch the video above to see how the organization uses computer coding, chess, and more to support the children’s success in school and in life.
Removing Children from Abusive Situations at Home Isn’t Always the Answer. This Is
Elisa Izquierdo was conceived in a Brooklyn, N.Y., homeless shelter and born with cocaine in her bloodstream in late 1980s. Her mother, Awilda Lopez, went on week-long drug binges and cashed welfare checks to feed her crack addiction. Two of Lopez’s other children lived with relatives, removed from the home by the court system.
Social workers placed Izquierdo in the custody of her father, where she remained until his death in 1994. After returning to live with her mother, school officials noticed that Izquierdo was withdrawn, walked as if recovering from an injury and had a large bruise marking her head, prompting them to call child welfare. Lopez responded by pulling her daughter out of the school. “When I asked her if she was hitting Elisa,” Izquierdo’s aunt recalls of a conversation with her sister, “she told me no, that she just punished her.”
In November 1995, three days before Thanksgiving, Lopez beat her daughter to death by throwing her against their housing project’s concrete wall, the impact causing the six-year-old’s brain to hemorrhage. After seeing the body, one police lieutenant told reporters that it was the worst case of child abuse he had seen in his 22 years on the force. Authorities had been notified of Izquierdo’s case at least eight times, but failed to respond despite plangent cries for help ringing out repeatedly.
The shocking murder, for which then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the entire city was “accountable,” led to the creation of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), a governmental body with a $2.9 billion budget charged to protect the well-being of New York City’s children. During its overzealous beginnings, the agency took things too far. In 1993, more than 45,000 kids resided in foster care. This year, in an equally stunning turn, those in the system numbered just 10,400, less than a quarter of its prior size. But with a spate of deaths in 2014, is the reduction in foster care population endangering children?
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At the time of Izquierdo’s murder, budget cuts placed heavy caseloads — allegedly as high as 25 families per employee in Queens — on child protection workers, who had little access to data collected by other city agencies. The entire child welfare system was based on “paper case files and folders,” some stacked five feet high along the office walls, says Andrew White, ACS’s deputy commissioner for policy, planning and measurement. A month after Izquierdo’s death, Mayor Giuliani contemplated an additional $18 million cut, largely from the team of field investigators. By the time the budget was drafted, however, he decided to take more decisive action by creating ACS to manage child welfare cases.
By setting up ACS to operate outside the larger social service bureaucracy and appointing a former federal prosecutor to head the agency, Giuliani set a presumption of action. “The philosophy of child welfare has been too rigidly focused on holding families together, sometimes at the cost of protecting babies and children,” Giuliani said in his 1996 address to the city council, according to The New York Times. “When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.” Almost overnight, ineffective investigations were replaced by punitive interventions.
But soon, mismanagement crept back in: One contractor faked records, while another misspent thousands of dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration vetted long-standing partnerships with group homes and residential rehab facilities, ending those that weren’t up to snuff. ACS’s professional staff began integrating a more rigorous understanding of mental health, domestic violence and substance abuse into their work, a move that would culminate in the next administration’s integration of research on trauma.
“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development.”
—Andrew White
In the last year and a half under Bill de Blasio’s mayorship, ACS pioneered new tactics to keep families united, shifting its emphasis to 11 evidence-based preventative services, which officials believe is the largest and most diverse continuum of child-centered programs anywhere in the world. Serving 19,962 families last year, the agency now asks, why take a child away from a bad parent if the city could help that parent do a better job of parenting in the first place?
“Since the late Nineties, there’s been a recognition that foster care is not a panacea. Foster care is very valuable in certain situations and very necessary in certain situations,” explains White, before adding that it’s also a traumatic experience for children that often doesn’t lead to positive results.
A growing body of work by sociologists and neuroscientists points to the negative effects of distressing, adverse experiences in childhood as the root for many developmental problems. Parents who were physically abused or neglected as kids are more likely to treat the next generation in a similar fashion, according to Cathy Spatz Widom, psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. That logic drove Giuliani to aggressively remove kids from dangerous upbringings, but advocates wondered if being separated from parents traumatized foster children?
By examining foster care records, Spatz Widom found little difference in arrest rates during adulthood between kids abused or neglected at home and those placed in foster care or with a guardian — proving that the instability of being removed from the home does not cause a child future harm. That being said, Spatz Widom did discover that children who were moved three times or more developed significant behavior problems — “chronic fighting, fire setting, destructiveness, uncontrollable anger, sadistic tendencies, and extreme defiance of authority” — and, in adulthood, had arrest rates that were nearly twice as high. Stability, she concluded, was hugely important for a child’s development.
“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development. The breakup of a family causes all kinds of trauma, and sometimes that’s necessary. But a lot of times — and we know from looking at cases now — many of the parents we work with today went into foster care during the crack years,” White says. “It’s devastating to see they don’t have stability in their lives, and they don’t have the parenting skills. You can see the history in what’s happening now. We don’t want to repeat that. We want to ensure families get what they need now.”
“When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.”
—Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
During an intervention today, ACS first tries to repair a family with intensive therapy and developmental workshops. If that fails, it looks to non-custodial parents or other family members to act as caretakers, keeping the family as intact as possible. “This is not a cookie-cutter approach. It’s individualized service to address their unique concerns,” White says.
Many of ACS’s 11 models were adapted from other realms of social work, particularly criminal justice, and cover every imaginable scenario. Brief Strategic Family Therapy, for example, is targeted at reasserting parental leadership when minors develop drug addictions and other behavior problems. Child-Parent Psychotherapy, meanwhile, helps mothers strengthen attachments with children under five who experienced a traumatic event, ensuring the youngster feels a sense of safety. There’s also various levels of monitoring. Family Treatment and Rehabilitation, which is on the high-risk end, helps participants achieve a baseline of sobriety (for instance) with three visits a week, while a low- to moderate-risk family struggling with poverty may partake in Family Connections, where plans are reevaluated every 90 days. A team of six improves program development, and other staff continuously monitor contractors to ensure correct procedures are followed.
Many are still critical of ACS, particularly when it comes to the length of time children stay in foster care — a median of 53 months in 2014 — waiting to be adopted. The city’s public advocate, Letitia James, filed a class action lawsuit in July on behalf of 10 foster children, which pointed out that New York City’s wait times are twice as long as the rest of the country and that children suffer higher rates of maltreatment while in foster care. In a press release, James claims that, “ACS has delegated foster care to 29 contract agencies, but has consistently failed to monitor these contract agencies — leaving thousands of children languishing in the system with no permanent home.” ACS attributes much of the adoption delay to bureaucratic systems outside their control and says their new programs are making headway. A settlement with Gov. Andrew Cuomo was reached in October, and a state-appointed monitor was assigned to ensure the city takes corrective action; ACS is still contesting the legal challenge in court.
Despite the suit, White looks at ACS’s progress today and believes that “we are far and away the leader in the country doing this work on the preventive side,” he says. “A small foster care system is a reflection of a healthy city. We have a city now that is more stable for families than back in the Nineties.”
The hope is that today, child protective workers would visit an Elisa Izquierdo earlier and regularly. They could provide treatment for her mother’s drug addiction and diagnose any mental illness. The innocent girl could be placed with another family member and would have the opportunity to grow up. Because of Izquierdo’s death, a system changed. Now it is ACS’s responsibility to ensure that she didn’t die in vain.
Homepage photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The Game-Changing Way to Access Social Services
If you’re looking for a restaurant recommendation, you log onto Yelp. Need a ride? Request an Uber or Lyft. Want the highest-rated doctor in your health insurance network? Try Zocdoc.
It’s undeniable that technology has changed the way we identify and select services. But which app connects you with legal aid to fight an eviction notice, helps you locate someone to assist signing up your kid for preschool, or directs you to a food pantry that’s open late?
Founded in 2010 in Austin, Texas, the startup Aunt Bertha is an online database of human services, connecting governments, charities and churches with the 75 million Americans in all 50 states who need their services, says founder Erine Gray. Thus far, his company has helped more than 177,000 people.
“In the United States, we spend a lot of money attempting to fix social problems — poverty, housing, food, health and job training — the effectiveness of which can be argued. When you look at the 1.4 million nonprofits in the U.S., how do you know which ones are good and which ones are not?” asks Gray. “Most people are not professional social workers. For somebody in need, it’s very difficult to find out what’s available to you.”
The software company’s name refers to no one’s relative in particular — the domain name for Aunt Sue was taken, and Aunt Bertha sounded like an eccentric, matronly figure in contrast to Uncle Sam — but the idea for the company did come from Gray’s personal struggles. After his mother suffered from a stroke, he encountered difficulties locating adequate assistance (she had lost brain functionality and required around-the-clock care). Even though she qualified for help, Gray’s mother was rejected by more than 20 nursing homes, often with a baffling, one-sentence letter that said, “We are not able to meet your mother’s needs” and no other explanation.
“There are nonprofits that offer home healthcare visits if you have income that’s low enough, but I didn’t know about those services when I was navigating my mom’s care. People come up to me after talks and say, ‘My son had autism and I didn’t have anybody to talk to about it until I found a support group,’ or ‘I lost my job and didn’t know about worker re-entry programs,’” Gray says. “As a caretaker for someone who was disabled, in my experience, nobody is trained for when life throws you a curveball.”
That trying experience led Gray to ditch his career as a software developer (he says he wasn’t a very good programmer anyway), go back to school for a master’s degree and eventually take a lead role at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. Making software and operational fixes, he streamlined the application process for services, saving the agency $5 million annually. Soon after, he took those lessons and founded his own company.
With Aunt Bertha, a person in Gray’s situation should have an easier time determining if their dependent is eligible for a given program. Searches can be narrowed based on multiple categories, such as age group, citizen or immigrant, housed or homeless and how urgent the problem is.
“What we wanted was a simple way for a seeker — the term we use for a person in need or their relative or champion — to essentially raise their hand and let an agency know electronically they need help,” Gray, a GLG fellow, explains. “Part of the vision is being able to find and apply for services in seconds.”
Eventually, as more users enroll in programs, Aunt Bertha will be able to track whether the charity met the person’s needs. As soon as a seeker submits an application for rental assistance or hearing aids, say, through the online portal, the service will clock the nonprofit’s response time and follow up with a satisfaction survey, creating a granular picture that’s more detailed than what can be found on GuideStar or Charity Navigator. The assessment will direct users to sign up for more effective programs.
On a grand scale, the program is already helping governments and nonprofits (like the Robin Hood Foundation) assess needs and measure the results of their funding. “We can tell you what people are searching for, what they’re finding and also what they’re not,” says Gray. For instance, if the number of searches for soup kitchens in Lubbock, Texas, suddenly spikes, it could encourage city lawmakers to look at large-scale solutions.
“If we’re successful, the entire nation will be able to visualize, in real time, where the pain is in the United States and see the suffering in the underbelly that doesn’t really show. Policymakers and data scientists will be able to see hotspots far earlier than any set of economic forecasts,” Gray says. “To be able to unlock that data and get it in the right hands, would be an amazing experience. We’d be able, in real time, to alleviate that suffering.”