About eight years ago I was commuting from a comfortable office in midtown Manhattan to a comfortable home in the suburbs and that took me, daily, through Harlem and the South Bronx. Looking out the window and seeing the deplorable conditions in which children were being raised, I could not help feeling that we, and our democratic society, were failing them. My wife and I talked about it and said, “Well, what can we do”?
We had heard about Gene Lang, a New York businessman who went back to his school in Harlem to give a graduation speech before the sixth graders, who were all black or Hispanic. His speech began, “Your future is limitless, the skies are bright,” but he knew that this wasn’t true. He tore up the rest of his speech and said, “The only way you can experience your dream is to graduate from high school and then from college. The odds are you won’t do that, but I’ll tell you what: If any of you graduate from high school and can get into college, I will see to it that your tuition is paid.” This was the beginning of a marvelous organization called the “I Have a Dream” Foundation.
My wife and I agreed to join Lang’s efforts. That spring, I spoke to a graduating class of 50 sixth graders in the South Bronx and made them the same promise: “You graduate from high school, and I’ll see that you can go to college.” The class was excited—for about two weeks, then interest waned. We hired a social worker and arranged for tutoring. We worked for six years with the 50 students that we “adopted.” When the class finished the 12th grade in June 1992, only seven enrolled in college. Five or six more may decide to enroll. Considering all the time and resources that we dedicated to this project, getting only 12 or 13 out of 50 students into college seems a waste.
It isn’t enough to want to do good. You have to determine what it is that you can do and then you will be successful. Why weren’t we making a dent in these kids’ attitudes? Why weren’t we able to improve their grades? Why weren’t we getting more of them to stay in school? We couldn’t change their home lives, we couldn’t change their neighborhoods, and we couldn’t even change their schools. If we could have changed their schools we would have had a much greater chance of succeeding.
There are two parallel school systems in New York City. The public school system enrolls 960,000 students. It involves a huge bureaucracy, with some 5,000 administrators outside the schools themselves. As of the early 1990s, it was costing $6,000 yearly to put a student through grammar school and $7,600 to put him through high school.
Now, the public system has some very good schools, even a few of national renown. But most students must go to what are known as “zoned schools.” There is no freedom to choose. A student must attend the zoned school to which he is assigned. Despite the millions of dollars that have been poured into them, zoned schools have a notoriously poor record of performance. Only 25 percent of all students in zoned New York inner-city schools graduate. According to the Rand Corporation, four years after entering high school about 15 percent take the SATs. Although these represent the best students, their average score is 604 combined. (You can score 400 just by signing your name twice.)
By contrast, the New York City private school system has 145,000 students and only 35 outside administrators. The average annual cost in recent years has been about $1,900 in grammar school and $3,200 in high school. The same Rand study says that of students comparable to those in zoned inner-city public high schools 70 percent take the SATS and have average scores of 802. Clearly, if you can change the inner-city students’ schools you can change their lives.
If we are trying to save kids who need an education and they are in a system that doesn’t educate, our efforts will fail, plain and simple. The answer to this dilemma is equally simple: Let’s take students out of the schools that don’t teach and put them into the schools that do teach. Six years ago, we decided to do just that. I approached the fellow in the office next to mine and said, “If you could change a student’s odds of success from one in eight to seven in eight, would you do it?” He said, “How?” I replied, “Pay his private school tuition for four years and spend some time with him.” The response was, “Lead me to him.” We went down to the next office and made the same pitch, and so on. There are now 637 sponsors for 637 students in New York City private schools. Seventy percent graduate from private schools and virtually all enroll in college.
Who are these 637 sponsors? They are young, fast-track attorneys or executives in the investment and commercial banking community. In this sense, they are like the protagonist in that wonderful satire, Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. But unlike Sherman McCoy, the “Master of the Universe” who had infinite courage on the trading desk but was scared to death to get off the freeway in the South Bronx, our 637 sponsors go into the South Bronx all the time. They are the ones, contrary to all the media stereotypes about “rich yuppies” and “greedy businessmen,” who are working hand in hand with schools to help hundreds of inner-city students get an education.
The key to the success of this effort is that everyone involved chooses to participate. For human creativity to flourish, it must be unfettered. Free individuals will do things that constrained individuals will never do. In the schools that are most successful, the principal chooses to be there and he chooses the way in which the school is organized. He chooses the teachers, and the teachers choose him. Together, they choose a curriculum. And then students and parents choose the school. Everybody buys into that single educational enterprise.
But this is not how most of the schools in our public system are organized. A principal, largely based on his length of tenure, is appointed. He is given a very strict set of guidelines of what and how to teach: say, 22.5 hours of English, 17.5 hours of math, driving instruction, sex education, hygiene, etc., and he may not vary the schedule. Teachers are assigned from the central pool. Even if they are incompetent, they are paid the same as other teachers and largely are protected from being fired or disciplined. Hordes of outside administrators and hundreds of regulations dictate what all teachers must and must not do in the classroom—they have almost no discretion. And then students are assigned to schools, regardless of whether they want to go. Finally, taxpayers are forced to pour more and more assets and resources into the system in the vain hope that more money will make it work.
American public education is organized exactly like Soviet agriculture was organized. It is a bureaucratic, top-heavy system with every decision directed from above. In every other walk of life we choose how we will spend our resources and where we will go to purchase services. Only in the first 12 years of public education are we denied freedom of choice.
That is why voluntarism and private philanthropy are so vital in America. We need to ensure that more students can choose their schools and more schools can choose to succeed in their own way. There is no shortage of individuals who are willing to make financial contributions or to get out there and put their shoulders to the wheel. Help them do it; show them how they can get involved and they will join you enthusiastically and support your effort. Stay away from bureaucracy. Be patient; don’t hurry and the rewards will be extraordinary. When I get a little blue or discouraged, I go to a little school at 110th Street called St. Ann’s. After spending time with the 300 inner-city minority students enrolled there, invariably I come away excited and uplifted. Or I attend a high school graduation and look at the face of a sponsor who is there to see his “adopted” student graduate. He or she is thinking, “That child is getting his diploma because of what I’ve done. I made a difference.”
