Sometimes, Limits Must Be Pushed

Lisbeth B. Schorr remembers when President Clinton, speaking to a 1993 session of the Democratic Leadership Council, made an interesting assertion.

“Every educational problem in America,” he said, “has been solved by someone, somewhere.” The clear implication: We know how to teach all our children, and the only remaining question is why we aren’t doing it.

Schorr now wants to expand the assertion and supply an answer to the question it raises. In her new book, “Common Purpose,” and in a recent interview she says this:

Every social problem - illegitimacy, joblessness, school failure, drug abuse, criminal recidivism, the transformation from welfare to work - has been solved by someone, somewhere. We know how to do it.

So why aren’t we doing it?

Two reasons, she says. We don’t want to spend the necessary money, and we don’t want to change the systems that have produced the failure.

Head Start might be an example of the first. That War on Poverty program, along with a spate of well-tested follow-up programs, has never been expanded to embrace even a majority of the children who are eligible for it - not because we doubt its efficacy but because it is costly.

The second reason is one Schorr finds particularly intriguing.

“Whether we are talking about those ‘geniuses’ that show up from time to time or about successful pilot programs, you keep coming back to the same thing.

” The successful people have been empowered, either by their own deeply held convictions or by some powerful godfather, to break the rules.

“But when you try to scale up - to generalize their success - you obviously can’t have everybody breaking the rules. Well, as long as the rules remain the same - and as long as the rules are totally inconsistent with what it takes to do it right - you can’t scale up.

“That’s what people keep missing. They think if you explain things better, or get the word out better about what works, success will spread. But spreading what works requires taking on a whole system, whereas doing it once - whether with a Debbie Meier (the celebrated principal of an East Harlem school) or in a pilot program - leaves the system untouched.”

What are these inflexible rules that keep systems from working? Schorr lists a number of examples in her book, including this one:

“A social worker in a family preservation program calls on a family that is threatened with having their child removed for abuse or neglect. She’s greeted by the mother, who says, ‘If there’s one thing I don’t need in my life right now, it’s one more social worker telling me what to do. You know what I really need? To get my house cleaned up.’

“And the social worker, who happened to be a highly trained clinical psychologist, responded by saying, ‘Would you like to start in the kitchen?’ While the two women were cleaning, they had a terrific conversation about what was going on in that family. When I told the story at a meeting, I was interrupted by the head of a university clinical psych department who said, ‘What that therapist did was unprofessional.’

“Well, all I can say is if we want effective interventions that have transformative effects on people, then we had better redefine what is professional, or allowable in the expenditure of public funds.”

Schorr, whose previous book, “Within Our Reach,” was a review of a host of successful social programs, understands the necessity of rules. But too often, she said, the rules that are intended to prevent bad things from happening make it impossible for good things to happen.

“It’s very clear to me that what works best is to give people on the front lines the authority and the flexibility to do what they see needs to be done - even some authority for spending money in unusual ways,” Schorr says. But it is also clear that at least some people will take advantage of that flexibility to line their pockets or to do favors for friends.

An insoluble dilemma? Not quite. The importance of Schorr’s fascinating book is that she has found people who’ve managed to get the conflict between rules and flexibility into some kind of balance - and with outstanding results.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = William Raspberry Washington Post