will.i.am's bold new plan

next up: providing places for kids to distance run in Ethiopia (cc)

Today at Oprah's 24th Season Kick-Off Party Extravaganza, for which she shut down a half-mile of Michigan Avenue, the Black-Eyed Peas played their summer smash hit 'I've Got a Feeling' (which apparently is different than 'Hooked on a Feeling,' unfortunately). Afterward, Oprah sat down with the band to find out not just what kind of outfits Fergie's dogs wore to her wedding (a gown and a tux, of course!), but also what frontman will.i.am's latest project will be. let me tell you, it's a winner.

will.i.am, best known in social-awareness circles for the inspiring if over-deifying 'Yes We Can' video he put together during the 2008 presidential campaign (i'll link it, not embed it, so you can choose whether or not to revisit february of 2008.), is starting a new media/awareness campaign, Africa Ten, to coincide with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. They're releasing a documentary film on ten pro soccer players from ten different African nations coming home to compete for the World Cup and putting on a concert in Jo'burg during the World Cup festivities. The beneficiary of the proceeds from this project, you may ask? Well, according to will.i.am, the money will go to help build places for kids in Africa to play soccer.

Stop the train. Isn't the beauty of soccer the fact that all you need is a ball, feet, and an empty field? Isn't there no shortage of empty fields in Africa? Don't lots of, if not all, kids in South Africa play soccer? Isn't the national obsession with soccer in South Africa and other African nations the reason that the World Cup is coming? '

Okay, to be fair to will.i.am and his shorthand, the official bio of the company says this:

we will create global exposure benefiting our sponsors, partners, and charitable causes, as well as generate a steady stream of income that, after a return on the initial investment, will flow directly into our African based charitable foundation. The foundation will focus grants initially on existing sports-based charities that have a proven track-record delivering on systemic improvements in health and education across Africa.

So it's a media company with a social-awareness angle, not a straight-up charity, and to be fair, he didn't portray it as one. Plus, 'existing sports-based charities that have a proven track-record delivering on systemic improvements in health and education across Africa' sounds a lot better than 'providing sod and white spray paint to newly-created intramural soccer programs across Africa.' Either way, it's always discouraging to see the Oprah platform used to suck all the nuance out of important issues in the name of increased exposure.

At any rate, here's the Black-Eyed Peas' hit for your viewing pleasure:

cross-posted at a waterblog

This blog has moved

hey gang,

i decided to condense this blog into another one i started a few years ago, thirstworld.blogspot.com in an attempt to consolidate my readership. i still think 'intelligent advocacy' is a snappy title, and as my blogging empire grows, i may need to revive this site.

until then, meet me at 'a waterblog,' thirstyworld.blogspot.com (another snappy title, don't you think?)

This Can't Be Right: Starbucks Edition

This morning, I walked past three Starbucks to get to the ing Direct Cafe in Chicago (which is in an un-street-viewed part of town, inexplicably). Having just moved here from New York, seeing a crapload of Starbuckses is not really anything new; I had to walk by two every day just to get two blocks to the subway. Still, having just been directed by Richard Florida to this piece in the Seattle times, which wonders "if Starbucks is an artifact of an economy that's not coming back?" I found myself hoping these ones would disappear soon.

It's not that I hate Starbucks; well, I think their coffee is scorched crap, but the atmosphere is actually pretty authentic for a coffee shop. The bigger problem, and the one that I hope isn't sustainable, is the attitude of the high-priced coffee drinker. Here I was, walking five blocks to a coffee shop with free wifi and coffee for a buck (plus a refill, and free on fridays!), and I walked by places where the coffee costs more than twice as much and wifi's $7.95 for two hours. And for what, marginally better coffee (i hope not)? Name recognition? I know the crisis has hit Starbucks hard, especially damping its insane growth, but seriously, this company should be dead and buried. At least, I'd like to see the data; at what level of economic distress do people stop caring about adjectives in front of their beverage names and start making modest, sensible choices?

God bless Starbucks for becoming a brand some people can't seem to live without, but if any real, sustainable belt tightening is ever going to take place in this country, undergrads, freelancers, and low-paid elites of all stripes will need to seriously rethink their daily coffee choices. Because the ing Cafe is delicious and pretty empty, now that school's out.

Nice Try, 'House'

Did you ever see the episode of 'House, MD,' where the guy from 'Office Space' plays a TB doctor in sub-Saharan Africa, probably modeled off of Paul Farmer's work in Haiti and elsewhere? It's a nice effort by the makers of the show to contrast House's 'save a patient a week that ,o one else could save' brand of medicine and Dr. Charles's 'save lots of patients that anyone else could save, if they had the money' approach. Interesting idea, to be sure, but one thing grated on me - throughout the show, Dr. Charles and everyone else keep referring to his place of work as Africa. Even when he offers one of House's fellows a job, he says, 'why don't you come to Africa with me?' not, 'Why don't you come to Botswana with me?' or 'Why don't you come to Lesotho with me?'

I know that TV producers are often loth to use real African countries when they do episodes focusing on poverty there, but come on, it's a big continent! And TB certainly doesn't affect all parts of it to the same degree. Is he raising money for TB patients in Morocco and Cameroon, or Djibouti and Sierra Leone? According to the WHO, Cameroon has a (2007) TB prevalence rate of 195/100,000, while Djibouti's is 1,104/100,000. To harp on a subject everyone has heard many times before, treating the whole country the same makes it less real, less familiar, and easier to ignore. By encouraging people to learn about how different TB rates are across the continent, and explore the often complex reasons why, 'House' could have encouraged its viewers to think of the diseases of sub-Saharan as important problems that need all the critical thinking we can get, and not just sick babies we should feel sorry for.

The High Cost of Poverty

DeNeen Brown has a great piece on the hidden costs of poverty in yesterday's Washington Post. Between lacking bank services and relying on fee-based check cashing, having to shop at corner stores instead of often faraway grocery stores, and the high cost of credit for the poor, the price tags for common goods are, seemingly paradoxically, higher for those in poverty than those who aren't. This isn't necessarily sinister on the part of any particular players, but a perverse outcome of the reality of low wealth and poor markets.

Here's Brown's 'primer on the economics of poverty' when buying food:

You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it's $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

Here's one poor interviewee's analysis of low-income housing:

"You pay rent that might be more than a mortgage," Reed says. "But you don't have the credit or the down payment to buy a house. Apartments are not going down. They are going up. They say houses are better, cheaper. But how are you going to get in a house if you don't have any money for a down payment?"

Even those folks who managed to get a house while credit was flowing are now facing rate resets based on the reality of their financial situation, meaning the punishingly high rates that are driving many of today's foreclosures.

I've thought a lot about these perverse economics facing the poor. As a frequent rider of the New York City subways, I'm always struck by the fact that, while well-to-do professionals are using unlimited-ride Metrocards, which mean a discounted fare if you take the subway at least to work and back, members of poor communities, even though they too ride the subway at least twice a day, are often using single rides. The poor people pay full fare while the rich and middle class get a discount, simply because it's easier to come up with 4 bucks a day every day than it is to come up with 81 bucks once a month. There has to be a way to deliver the benefits of the discounted Metrocard to people who struggle to amass enough cash to buy one. Meanwhile, full-fare cards should target the people who need them, can afford them, and should, by all rights, be subsidizing the city's finances: deep-pocketed, transit-loving tourists.

Any ideas? Any organizations out there trying to ease the economics of the poor? I'd love to hear about them.

David Brooks Frustrates Me

In his op-ed last week, David Brooks talked about the extraordinary (and rigorously-documented) success of the Promise Academies, a pair of charter schools inside the Harlem Children's Zone, a 97-block region of the Manhattan neighborhood dedicated to lift children who live there out of poverty.

The Promise Academies are the most effective piece of the social services network in the HCZ, according to a recent, as-yet-unpublished paper by renowned education researcher Roland Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie. To quote from their paper(pdf),

The Promise Academies have an extended school day and year, with coordinated after-school tutoring and additional classes on Saturdays for children who need remediation ... Our rough estimate is that Promise Academy students that are behind grade level are in school for twice as many hours as a typical public school student in New York City. Students who are at or above grade level still attend the equivalent of about fifty percent more school in a calendar year.  

Both schools emphasize the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers and use a test-score value-added measure to incentivize and evaluate current teachers. The schools have had high turnover as they search for the most effective teachers...Each teacher...is supported by myriad behind-the-scenes efforts to make sure their time is spent primarily on teaching and not administrative tasks.

The schools provide free medical, dental and mental-health services ... student incentives for achievement... high-quality, nutritious, cafeteria meals, support for parents in the form of food baskets, meals, bus fare, and so forth, and less tangible benefits such as the support of a committed staff. The schools also make a concerted effort to change the culture of achievement, surrounding students with the importance of hard work in achieving success.

A mouthful, right? There's a whole lot of programs, policies, and resources mentioned in there that are proven engines of educational achievement. It's really an extraordinary program. So, of course, what does Brooks harp on?

To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values....

Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands...

The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap.

Italics mine. Look, I'm not going to sit here and say that cultivating a culture of achievement isn't an important part of transforming inner-city education; it is. It's just that, it's not the whole story. Sure, Brooks mentions the longer hours, the relentless hunt for the right teachers and rigorous analysis of their performance, as well as the comprehensive medical and nutritional care offered to the children and their families; all these issues get a sentence or two. But his constant evocation on 'middle-class' (think Cleaver family) values is disingenuous and irresponsible. Does he really think other schools don't want their students to respect learning? Of course they do! HCZ and the Promise Academy have far more time with their students to inculcate these values, not to mention the fact that the students had to win a lottery to get in, so they're easier to motivate/guilt. The public school system is committed to cultivating respect for others and respect for achievement among the student body. It's just a far harder challenge without a ferociously dedicated staff, a full-time committment from students and families, and the resources to innovate.

This is the problem with David Brooks. He hits on great ideas and extraordinary people, but can never resist trying to frame the world in his stale sociological construction where everything would be better if we all lived like the Nelsons. If David Brooks suddenly got an extra billion dollars to spend in the New York City public schools, would he really spend it on traditional-middle-class-value training? What does he think Roland Fryer would spend it on?

What Do Communities in Need Actually Need?

Via Andrew Sullivan, Matt Steinglass makes an excellent request - Please stop building schools in Iraq & Afghanistan:

Here’s a general rule that applies to basically every development program in every poor country in the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan: want to do something nice and useful for these people? Don’t build them a school. Believe it or not, people in poor countries actually have buildings. And they are capable of building more of them. They know how to do it, and it usually, for fairly simple economic reasons, does not cost more in any country to build a building than local people can afford. You know what they don’t know how to do? Teach science and math and English. And often, employing a trained teacher does cost more than they can afford in a small village, because such people are scarce, and it’s hard to spare extra labor in subsistence economies. If you want to spend your money on education, don’t build them a school; pay to train some teachers, and then pay the teachers’ salaries.

Development is not about buildings. It is not about objects. It’s about people.

Aside from the slightly jarring use of the phrase 'these people,' this post struck all the right chords. Too much of the development industry in the developing world translates into construction, raw materials, and any number of tasks that members of underserved communities are perfectly capable of completing. The real 'needs' in 'needy' communities are capacity-building, information, and other non-rival goods from which these communities are isolated. Not only is it repetitive to help communities do the things they could just as easily do themselves (but haven't chosen to), but building one building is far less efficient than helping create an incentive system where a functional educational system can flourish. Like Matt says, it's not a lack of buildings holding back education in the developing world; it's the lack of an effective system of educational delivery.

This idea isn't brand new of course, and the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan are tasked more with capacity-building and governance improvements than simply building buildings. Still, the fact that some organizations are still building buildings instead of figuring out more effective uses of donor dollars is a huge concern.