Learn from Your Successes
This is the sort of story that drives me a little bit crazy, because my natural impulse to believe that people have reasonable explanations for their decisions runs headlong into my inability to imagine what those reasonable explanations are.
Philadelphia has been running a program for years where if a school has a large population of poor children, the district won’t require the families to fill out paperwork to apply for free breakfasts or lunches – they’ll just provide the free meals to the entire school. The thinking is, you save time and administrative costs, you avoid kids falling through the cracks, and you don’t place the responsibility for kids being in the program on the kids or their parents. The program began as a pilot program 17 years ago, and last year the Bush Administration suggested that it was going to wind down the program. In the last few weeks, an Obama Administration official has suggested that they plan to continue the phaseout – leading, incidentally, to some botched communication about when it’s ending.
Now, in fairness, there is some disagreement in the article about the documentation for the program, but it seems to me that the major objection people are bringing up is that 17 years is too long for a pilot program, and other districts want to know why Philadelphia’s special and doesn’t have to do all this paperwork. These actually strike me as legitimate concerns. Now, what is the reasonable way to handle them? Well, if it were me, I’d say that you should expand this successful program and take it out of the pilot stage so that other cities get to enjoy the benefits. But apparently that’s not the way the Department of Agriculture rolls.
Now, besides the fact that having students be well-fed is kind of critical to their success, this is important to me on a larger scale. If you believe, like I do, that human beings are capable of coming together, looking at the world around them, learning new ways to interact with that world, and then putting that knowledge to use, this story is a shovel to the face. Because we carried out an experiment here, we got the data, and we’re refusing to implement the good idea that came as a result.
That’s not a good change, and that’s not pragmatism. But that’s a post for later.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.