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Are you ready to age while working in academia?

This is a guest post by Genie Giaimo, Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric, Middlebury College (Ggiaimo@Middlebury.edu). While the post focuses on aging and academia, it has implications for grant seekers and grant writers: most federal grants for the delivery of services to the elderly come are derived from the 1965 Older Americans Act administrated by the DHHS Administration for Community Living (“ACL”). The ACL funds over 600 Area Agencies on Agencies (AAA) across America, which is turn fund local nonprofit and public service providers. So, your agency can get OAA grants directly from the feds and/or your local AAA. The National Institute on Aging (“NIA”) is the primary federal source for research grants relating to aging.

Higher education deserves more attention as a workplace site, and, as part of this effort, I plan to survey and interview academic workers across rank, years of experience, and disability and health statuses. Consider higher ed in the context of America’s workforce, which is undergoing unprecedented seismic shifts—with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns, workers started to rethink their relationship to their jobs (McKinsey & Company, 2022). Many workers now report their new top concerns as being able to work remotely, organize safer workplaces and better wages, and shifting priorities from “workism” to non-work pursuits. Corporations are flirting with the four-day work week* and alternative productivity models. Remote work is undergoing a natural test case and has largely been found to increase worker productivity (George et al., 2021) though managers and workers differ in their perceptions of remote work outcomes (Tsipursky, 2022). Labor is in our zeitgeist because work leads to self-efficacy and for most, give meaning to their lives. And with the increase in union organizing—across many different sectors including ones not historically pro-union, like the tech sector—workers have begun to recognize their value.

The last fifty years, however, have seen limited gains for American workers, including stagnant wages, increased cost of living, and an increase in overall working hours (Lee, 2022). Americans work more than their French, German, and Japanese counterparts (International Labor Organization). And the 2008 financial collapse saw the devastation of stable middle class jobs in favor of part-time, low wage work (McCallum, 2020). For these reasons, and more, over 40 million Americans changed their jobs the past several years. While many bemoaned “the great resignation,” it is more accurate to say that the workforce has undergone a “great reshuffle” (Meister, 2022). Time is now seen as an invaluable commodity (Stolzoff, 2023).

As a scholar, I’m attuned to the underlying sentiment around workers and labor in the media landscape. My research reveals that the attitudes about labor and productivity differ greatly between workers and management. The most fascinating connections, however, between rhetoric and work are the ones that center on the conflation of individual health and well-being with the well-being of the nation. In the early days of the pandemic, we often heard such rhetoric from politicians and from our government—for example, that keeping the economy open was more important than individual lives. As Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested elderly grandparents are willing to die for the benefit of the economy and the nation (Levin, 2020). The trade-off between individual and economic benefits also came to light in government policies around who was labeled an essential worker (and, later, who received work from home privileges and who did not). This rhetorical flip flopping became a catalyst for labor organizing which, in turn, shifted the identities of many care workers. And, as the essential worker as “hero” narrative was replaced with less favorable interpretations of care workers labor, healthcare workers and teachers, for example, left their jobs in droves (McCallum, 2022). The rhetorical figurations of workers, deeply impacts not only the workplace but worker identity; this is not just an economic or governmental issue.

Higher education has followed a similar trajectory over the last half century with the hollowing-out of tenure, “adjunctification” of the professorate, and the de-skilling of many university-based jobs moved to part-time student and staff lines. The supply of people who want to work in universities is far higher than the demand for workers, so wages (considered broadly) have stagnated or fallen. At the same time, the cost of a college education has ballooned, as has the number of administrators staffing colleges and universities. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated labor organizing as the recent strikes at Rutgers University of California—among many others—demonstrate (Iafolla, 2023). We are also in an unprecedented moment for academic workers organizing and unionizing (Barnes & Thornburg LLP, 2023). Yet the patchwork system of laws and regulations that public and private higher education institutions follow deeply impacts who can organize and form a union.

My research is centered on the impact of aging on the academic worker and workplace. If the local, state, and federal laws that dictate who can unionize and who is prohibited, the complex set of roles that academic workers occupy further complicates the landscape. For example, tenure track faculty at private institutions are not allowed to unionize because they were determined to be managers by the 1980 Yeshiva ruling (AAUP), yet non-tenure track faculty and staff are excluded from this SCOTUS ruling. At public universities and colleges, all workers can unionize. Still, the stakes of unionization are high. Intimation, misinformation, and downright retaliation are some of the barriers to organize. The stakes are highest for the most precarious university workers, like adjuncts and other part-time, non-benefitted, workers. Many institutions engage in union busting tactics including intimidation, misinformation and retaliation (AAUP; Fang, 2022).

The patchwork system of rules around union organizing as well as retaliation—combined with the Covid-19 pandemic and a better than average job market—have been catalysts for many university workers. Another, darker side to this tale is the ongoing exploitation of workers in higher education. Non-tenure track workers now many up over 70% of the professoriate with national numbers hovering in the mid-20% range for TT lines. At the same time, academic freedom is being challenged in states across the country; last year 53 bills have been introduced to state legislature to restrict teaching and research in higher education (Levenstein and Mittelstadt, 2022). States such as Florida, Texas, and Ohio passed bills that restrict DEI and other cultural touchpoints in higher education curricula even as political factotums are being named to the highest administrative positions at public universities, hundreds of colleges and universities are struggling with solvency issues (The Hechinger Report, 2020). Amid these large-scale concerns, the health and well-being of academic workers might not seem like a top issue. Still, given the widespread precarity of most academic workers, and the bleak financial climate at many higher education institutions, now is an important moment to evaluate how academic workers are treated and what lies ahead as they continue to age into their work—and to look at why they don’t switch careers, into healthier, in-demand industries.

Already, academic workers are more likely to delay retirement out of financial concerns. And, given the large number of non-benefitted at-will academic workers, there is a crisis on our hands for aging as an academic worker. While this issue is framed as a cost-basis problem for schools (or the government), I’m interested in understanding how academic workers navigate their institution’s wellness-related policies, such as different types of medical leave, short-term and long-term disability, FMLA, and other unpaid and paid policies. I want to survey academic workers to understand how these things work.

Navigating policies in any workplace can be challenging. My hope is that more research on academic workers leads to measurable and consistent reform in U.S. higher education that is better prepared for the kinds of precarious workers it currently hires, rather than tenure track ones it previously hired. Yet the individualistic nature of higher education makes it difficult, even among tenured faculty, to navigate job expectations and leave policies, especially during unanticipated health crises. Add to this erosion of worker benefits (e.g., retirement contributions, leave policies, and insurance plans) for staff and faculty, alike, and we are headed for a perfect storm of aging, ill, and disabled academic workers. We need better structures in place to prepare and to advocate for meaningful workplace policies and support.

 

 

 

 

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Modern HIV prevention and education grant-funded programs

Astute healthcare-related nonprofit and public agency managers who follow grant opportunities have probably noticed how many of those grant opportunities use specific, somewhat coded language to express whatever it is that they want (read a lot, and you’ll start to see patterns in RFP verbiage). We’ve written many modern HIV prevention and education grant-funded programs, and, consequently, we’ve gotten very good at designing how those programs should be pitched to funders—the most common being the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Still, HRSA Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) are often opaque about how exactly the applicant is supposed to provide services and what precisely the applicant should do. The purpose of being opaque may be so that applicants can signal their underlying competence and knowledge.

Many HIV-services programs can be divided into two categories, although the categories can overlap: prevention/education and treatment. We’re going to focus on the former, at least in this post, though some grant-funded programs will ask for both components. A typical grant-funded project purpose for a program designed to provide prevention and education is something like “reduce HIV transmission via outreach and engagement.” The target population will usually be persons at high risk for HIV/AIDs, but who are known to not be HIV+. Federal funders like vaguely bureaucratic terms like “persons” over more human terms like “folks;” the more bureaucratic and less human a proposal sounds, the more funders will typically like it.*

The applicant agency should typically propose a project that will use peers of the high risk population—that is, people who are “culturally and linguistically like the target population”—to do outreach, engagement, and education. A common term for such a position is a “Community Health Worker” (CHW). CHWs are often paired with Registered Nurses (RNs) or similarly licensed clinicians: the CHW goes out, finds the target, high-risk population, talks to members of the target population, and gets them to be tested.

This involves some combination of on-the-spot rapid HIV testing to see if the high-risk person might already be positive, along with education and the like if they’re not. Education includes things like “why using PrEP is a good idea,” “how to avoid sharing needles,” etc. The CHW will encourage the at-risk person to reduce risky behaviors (e.g., sharing needles, or unprotected sex with multiple random partners, and the like). This kind of outreach effort is sometimes done with a mobile outreach unit, often a van, that’s owned/leased and operated by the applicant. In some grant programs, it’s possible to buy the van with grant funds, but, even when the van isn’t covered, leasing and operating costs (e.g., gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.) should be eligible grant costs.

In addition to culturally and linguistically street-based education and rapid HIV testing in the outreach van, CHWs try to get who are found to be HIV+ via rapid test a follow-up laboratory confirmation test. If the lab test confirms the person is HIV+, the CHW tries to get help that person get into treatment. Persons who are positive should in particular be targeted for entry into services.

But funders usually also want all high-risk persons who are engaged by the team to establish a medical home and, for HRSA, this means at a Federally Qualified Health Center’s (FQHC). In the real world, many FQHCs aren’t excited by the prospect of new, high-risk, and difficult-to-serve patients, but HRSA and other funders want to hear that this is going to happen.

HIV+ persons obviously need care, and consistent care, both to ensure their own safety and to reduce the likelihood of community transmission. Modern, consistently applied HIV treatments haven’t, to our knowledge, been shown to conclusively, completely, continuously prevent HIV transmission, but they can make the virus nearly undetectable in the body, which likely reduces transmission (if there is evidence one way or another, please cite it in the comments). PrEP in the high-risk, but uninfected population, in combination with effective, consistent usage of anti-HIV drugs in the infected population, is a potent combination to reduce HIV prevalence, which is why almost all modern HIV-prevention programs want this approach, whether they say so directly or not.

The peer-to-peer outreach approach, in which the organization hires CHWs with the “street cred” to engage the target population, ensures that the target population is more likely to accept some level of engagement, education, and behavior changes to reduce risks. The peer positions receive training in HIV and how HIV prevention works, and then go into the community to seek high-risk, hard-to-reach persons. Applicants should also propose more general outreach efforts focused on social media. Virtually all targeted persons will have smart phones; even most homeless people do, today.

The approach we’ve discussed above can be described in more detail or less detail—for example, what specifics will the educational effort cover? How long will CHWs seek to talk to each person who is reached out to?—but the basic structure has been consistent for years.

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Depressing NAEP math and reading assessments provide grant-writing opportunities for nimble nonprofits

Despite the media’s fascination with irrelevancies like the Kardashians and moment-by-moment interpersonal political drama, many outlets at least partially covered the disastrous recent National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Report on the 2022 4th and 8th Grade Math and Reading Assessments.* The Report says:

Between January and March 2022, the NAEP mathematics and reading assessments were administered to representative samples of United States fourth- and eighth-grade students. [. . . ] Student academic achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic is compared to pre-pandemic performance on the 2019 NAEP assessments as well as to previous assessments dating back to 1990.

In 2022, the Report finds (the next six bullets come from the Report):

Mathematics

  • The average fourth-grade mathematics score decreased by five points and was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2005; the average score was one point higher compared to 2003.
  • The average eighth-grade mathematics score decreased by eight points compared to 2019 and was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2003.
  • Fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics scores declined for most states/jurisdictions as well as for most participating urban districts compared to 2019.

Reading

  • The average reading score at both fourth and eighth grade decreased by three points compared to 2019.
  • At fourth grade, the average reading score was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2005 and was not significantly different in comparison to 1992.
  • At eighth grade, the average reading score was lower compared to all previous assessment years going back to 1998 and was not significantly different compared to 1992.
  • Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores declined for most states/jurisdictions compared to 2019.

Take a few minutes to read these bullet points again. It’s widely recognized that, if a student can’t read at grade level in 3rd grade, the likelihood that they will not graduate from high school (and may become functionally illiterate adults) goes way up. America’s increasingly information-based economy demands workers with at least an understanding of high-school-level math. No one is going to become a coder without algebra skills. On the other hand, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that many fast-growing jobs require few reading and math skills—some of those jobs being cooks, for example. And the fields with the most new jobs include “Home health and personal care aides” and ” Waiters and waitresses.” These sorts of jobs, however, usually don’t pay living wages (or barely pay them) and have very little career ladder potential.

Still, although the COVID-era learning losses are bad, they also imply opportunities for nonprofits interested in after-school and tutoring efforts. While there’s already lots of federal, state, local, and foundation funding for educational enrichment programming, there’ll likely be much grant funds for this purpose soon, as reality sinks in.

So, if your nonprofit works with at-risk youth** or wants to, the coming months will be a great time to seek funding for after school and/or tutoring programs. For example, the state of Arizona just announced a second year of funding for the OnTrack Summer Camp, which provides educational enrichment for over 70,000 school-age kids. The OnTrack Summer Camp website states: “With over $100 million from the American Rescue Plan Act ready to fund engaging Summer Camp experiences, school leaders, educators, and youth service providers like you can apply for AZ OnTrack funding so parents in your community have a trusted place to send their students for up to 8 weeks of educational opportunities.” Translated into English, this means Arizona nonprofits can apply for grants to provide these services.

These kind of RFP opportunities will be popping up all over America soon, not just Arizona. Some of the money will come from long-standing federal pass-through to states programs like 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) Program and the Title I Supplemental Educational Services (SES) Program, while other funding will come from COVID-era programs like ARP. Expect some new programs, too. Make sure your agency gets on the mailing/email lists for your state department of education, municipality, and school district—and start knocking on community foundation doors. The last time there was a flood of money into educational support programs was during the Clinton era, and the early days of the George W. Bush Administrations, which overlap almost perfectly with the 30 year timeframe of educational stagnation highlighted by the NAEP report.


* The “media” is also a machine for responding to reader incentives, so if articles about banal interpersonal dramas do well, the media produces more of them. Look in the mirror, and see if that the enemy is there. This is also true of voting, by the way.

** The current politically correct phrase for “at-risk youth” is now “opportunity youth,” if you like that euphemism better.

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The effects of early childhood education programs don’t look good: a large, randomized pre-kindergarten study

There’s a large, new study out on the “Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children’s achievement and behavior through sixth grade,” and it’s important and unusual because of its results: it finds that pre-k education doesn’t help later educational or behavioral achievement and, if anything, hurts later student achievement. This study is also significant due to its comprehensiveness; the study follows 3,000 kids, who appear to be randomly assigned to pre-k services or not, and the study follows those kids for a long period of time—at least seven years, it seems, and possibly longer. I’ve not got the full manuscript yet but am seeking a copy. Most education studies are observational, in that they observe two or more cohorts, but they don’t use randomized controls, like this one does, and observational studies are particularly prone to bias. The new study is also pre-registered—that is, the authors say what they’re looking for, what success looks like, and how they’re going to measure success before they get their data. There’s a “replication crisis” in social science and medicine, because it’s possible to torture a positive result out of all sorts of data, and this study avoids most if not all of the common pitfalls.

The study’s abstract says:

Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention

Wow: that’s counter to the intuition of most people, politicians involved in early childhood education, and “common wisdom.” The study is not the last word—no study is—but it is persuasive. For most practitioners, this won’t be immediately relevant, because Head Start and Pre-K For All aren’t likely to see real changes in the near term. But we may see the political winds change over time.

This post is not a policy recommendation: as grant writers, we don’t do policy recommendations, although I do think a lot of students are in college who’d be better served by alternatives, and yet society as a whole hasn’t yet figured that out or properly grokked it, even as total student loans owed passes $1 trillion. But, if America wants to do some form of daycare for all (“universal daycare”), as is proposed in the stalled Build Back Better legislation, that’s a fine goal and we should call it that, instead of pretending it’s possible to have academic, “educational” experiences for the vast majority of kids under the age of five. Four-year olds are not falling “behind,” because, except in the case of unusual prodigies, there is nowhere to fall behind. If anything, excess regimentation and premature optimization are likely to be bigger problems than “falling behind.”

I’ve long been somewhat suspect of early childhood “education”—not from studies per se, but from being around small children. Most don’t have the executive function to do much in the way of what might be called “education.” Trying to create “education” in the sense that we see with older kids or adults seems improbable for very young children. The veneer of “education” using “curriculums” like “The Creative Curriculum” and “The Creative Curriculum GOLD” that we cite in grant proposals seems faintly ridiculous; whether or not a four-year old can identify different kinds of leaves or songs or animals by name doesn’t seem to indicate how that four-year old will do in middle or high school, or college. But there’s a lot of social and economic anxiety around class, economic achievement, and housing; we’ve collectively adopted policies focused on creating scarcity, not abundance, and that’s resulted in intense, and probably pointlessly intense, competition in many fields.

Trying to indoctrinate small children into social, academic, and economic competition culture seems difficult to me, and yet that’s been one response to scarcity policies. Making early childhood teachers, who are really more like caregivers in the classroom, have degrees or advanced degrees seems like a way of raising the cost of childcare without providing much in benefits; everyday human experience seems to be sufficient for taking care of small kids. Maybe small kids are learning cultural markers and such in the early early childhood education setting that will help them later, but, if so, that later help isn’t showing up in the data. There’s a lot of desire to make education a panacea for various kinds of social and economic inequality, but that desire keeps running up against uncomfortable ideas (I won’t call them “truths,” although some might).

Head Start was launched in 1965 as on the initial programs in President Johnson’s “War on Poverty;” if there’s been a large boost in real educational attainment (which is different from “degrees achieved”), I’ve not seen it. I’ve been teaching college undergrads since 2008, and in that time my anecdotal impression is that smartphones and social media have been net bad for learning, noting however that some people do leverage Internet technologies to learn more and faster than they could without. Anecdotes are not data, but, since the late ’90s and early ’00s, we here at Seliger + Associates Grant Writing have been writing proposals for programs like the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC), and in that time we’ve not seen learning substantially improve from the dissemination of computers and the Internet. In 2013, I wrote a post about a pair of studies finding that computer access appears, if anything, to lower educational attainment. In 2015, I wrote about Kentaro Toyama’s book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology. “Computers in education” is not the same thing, obviously, as early childhood education, but both are attempts at improving education and life outcomes that are popular but may not be efficacious. If you work in the education industry with students ages 10 or higher—ages old enough for smart phones to have penetrated the population—ask those around you to look at their Apple “Screen Time” app or Android “Digital Wellbeing” controls. Those show how many minutes or hours a day a smartphone is being used, and what a person is doing on that phone. From what I’ve observed, very few people are using the book apps, the Duolingo systems for language learning, or Anki for space-repetition learning. Ask around, see what you find. Think about what that might mean.

Real education is hard. I’ve tried to impart some to students. Probably it’s always been hard and always will be. We should collectively try to do better while also understanding what might be limited, what might be futile, and what might be counterproductive. I’m struck by, at the college level, how little time is spent trying to learn how to teach more effectively, and friends who teach in K – 12 often report the same.

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Head Start grantees and early childhood education program staffing woes

Head Start grantees are likely suffering, and grant writers looking to produce Head start budgets in the future are going to have to change, according to an article with a title that is exhaustingly long but still conveys the general point: “‘The pay is absolute crap’: Child-care workers are quitting rapidly, a red flag for the economy: Child care employment is still down more than 126,000 positions as workers leave for higher-paying positions as bank tellers, administrative assistants and retail clerks. Parents are struggling to return to work as daycare and after-school programs dwindle.”

Baseline pay for Head Start frontline workers has never been high, based on the budgets we’ve prepared and been given by our clients. But Head Start generally won’t increase grants to grantees who’re unable to hire workers in with their budget, and there is a minimum staff-to-child ratio—so grantees can’t simply deploy fewer staff for the same number of kids. I’m supposed to be the guy with the answers, but in this situation I’m not sure what grantees are going to do, or can do. Money for staffing is the big problem right now among Head Start and other similar early childhood education providers:

day care workers typically make about $12 an hour for a demanding job year-round. Public schools and other employers, which are also scrambling to hire workers, are poaching child-care staffers by offering thousands of dollars more a year and better benefits. A nearby Dunkin’ starts pay at $14 an hour.

If you’re paying less than fast food, you’re going to have trouble keeping and recruiting early childhood education staff, and there is no clear way around that blunt fact.

More than a third of child-care providers are considering quitting or closing down their businesses within the next year, as a sense of hopelessness permeates the industry, according to a report last month from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

It’s possible some of those providers will attempt to convert to Head Start operations, but many probably can’t, because some other organization already holds the local Head Start contract.

Although this article focuses on worker wages, the other big problem is rent: almost all municipalities have draconian rules around new construction and parking minimums, and those bad policies raise the cost of land and especially new buildings. The “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement has arisen to attempt to combat unfair land-use laws, but the legislative process is slow and Head Start operators need relief now. Tech companies and the like may be able to pass those high land and rent costs onto customers, but low-margin businesses like Head Start or daycare can’t, so they merely suffer. There is a parent-and-family-focused argument for land-use reform, though relatively few people are making it (apart from me!). Still, “The housing theory of everything: Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates” covers the topic. We’re not only short of housing—we’re also short of commercial buildings, like child-care facilities. In rural areas, most Head Start operators have no problems finding facilities. In urban ones, it can be excruciatingly difficult, due to local public policy.

The WaPo article focuses more than it should on shoving more public money into the problem; while that would be nice, so would cutting the cost of non-staff childcare costs—like rent—through land-use reform. Overall, we’re not far off from the inflation worries Isaac described a few weeks ago.

One woman says:

“Our country needs to look at what we really value. We should value our youngest learners,” Cover said. “Our youngest kids should be cared for and educated in settings that are no less than what they receive in K-12 school districts.”

Amen. But our youngest learners don’t vote, and our oldest do. There’s a cliche in economics and politics that goes something like, “Don’t tell me what you value, just show me your budget.” A cursory look at both federal and most state budgets reveal what we really value, as opposed to what we say we value.

This post first appeared on Grant Writing Confidential. Call us at 800.540.8906 for a fast, free fee-quote on any grant writing assignment.

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Links: Opioids treatment, unglamorous but important bureaucracy, Pre-K for All, and more!

* “‘Pure incompetence:’ As fatal heroin overdoses exploded in black neighborhoods, D.C. officials ignored life-saving strategies and misspent millions of federal grant dollars. More than 800 deaths later, the city is still reckoning with the damage it failed to prevent.” If your organization is working on the opioid crisis, you should give us a call, because there’s a huge amount of federal, state, and local funding for it. Rural areas are seeing and especially large burst of funding.

* “The Tragedy of Germany’s Energy Experiment: The country is moving beyond nuclear power. But at what cost?”

* America’s National Climate Strategy Starts with NEPA. Unglamorous but important.

* Officials want to clear a mile-long homeless camp on a Sonoma County bike trail. Some don’t want to go. We’re guessing that those who don’t want it to go also don’t use the bike trail or live near it.

* The hottest new thing in sustainable building is, uh, wood. If you’re doing construction-related job training, mention cross-laminated timber (CLT) in your next proposal.

* On the Chinese education system and philosophy. It’s nearly the opposite of what programs like Pre-K For All or Early Head Start attempt to do. I wonder how well it works, although that will be hard to say, since it probably takes 40 or 50 years to properly evaluate how an early childhood education program “works,” by which point the entire cultural, social, and technological environment will have changed.

* For another perspective, read me on Bringing Up Bébé, an essay that is sure to be of interest to anyone providing early childhood education services like Pre-K For All or Head Start. We collectively ought to spend more time looking at early childhood from a cross-cultural perspective and less time on making early childhood “academic.” Life is not a race. France and China seem different in key ways but surprisingly similar in some.

* “Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy.” Donations by rich people are better than not, and criticism is misguided. Foundations offer flexibility that government funding typically does not.

* “Let’s quit fetishizing the single-family home.” This would also make programs like YouthBuild work more effectively: zoning restrictions are now one of the biggest problems with any job-training program that includes a construction training element. Many of today’s challenges are really housing and healthcare policy challenges, with powerful incumbents blocking change and the powerful need for change building up.

* “The Age of Decadence: Cut the drama. The real story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation.” An interesting thesis, but not necessarily one that I buy.

* Was the nuclear family a mistake?.

* How we write scientific and technical grants.

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More experiments in education and job training: Shopify’s “Dev Degree”

Lots of us know that traditional education providers offer various kinds of on-the-job training, work experience, internships, and similar arrangements with employers; in typical arrangements, someone who primarily identifies as a student also does some work, often paid but sometimes not, to get some real-world experience. But what happens if you try going the other way around?

You may have read the preceding sentence a couple of times, trying to understand what it means. Shopify, the ecommerce platform, is now offering something called “Dev Degree,” which is described as “a 4-year, work-integrated learning program that combines hands-on developer experience at Shopify with an accredited Computer Science degree from either Carleton University or York University.” On Twitter, one of Shopify’s VP’s said that “We pay tuition & salary, ~$160k over 4 yrs”—so instead of student loans, the student, or “student,” comes out net positive. Instead of identifying as someone who is primarily a student but does a little work experience, a person presumably identifies primarily as a worker but does some schooling too.

As often happens, the old is becoming new again. Before lawyers enacted occupational licensing restrictions to raise their wages, most proto-lawyers just studied under senior lawyers using an apprenticeship model. When the proto-lawyer could pass the bar and convince clients to give him money, he was a lawyer—one who’d learned on the job. Think of Abe Lincoln, who become something greater than a passable country lawyer.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Lambda School, Make School, and now Shopify School (okay, it’s not technically called that) are concentrated in tech and programming, where an extreme shortage of qualified candidates seems to intersect with extremely high demand for qualified candidates. The New York Times and Economist aren’t proposing ways to more quickly and cheaply turn English majors into journalists, because there are plenty of English majors and few journalism jobs. But these experiments in alternative education are interesting because they speak to the relentlessly rising cost of conventional education combined with onerous student loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy (the infamous 2005 bankruptcy “reform” act made student loans almost impossible to discharge). If there’s enough pressure on a system, the system starts to react, and Dev Degree is another example of the reaction.

We’ve been covering the “alternative education” beat in various places for a lot of reasons, one being that we do a lot of work for colleges and universities. Another is in the fact that I’ve spent some time in the basement of the ivory tower, where I’ve witnessed some insalubrious, unsavory practices and behaviors. Another is that we’ve had an uptick in stories from nonprofit clients and potential clients about their clients or participants who have relatively small amounts of student loan debt, often in the $1,000 to $4,000 range, but that the participant can’t pay off. So the participant starts school, quits or otherwise can’t finish, and then drags around this mounting debt while making minimum wage or close to it.

Yet another way to cover these stories is the potential for these kinds of systems to be applied in other fields, like healthcare tech, truck driving, and the like. Most government-sponsored job training programs focus on these kinds of fields, and they haven’t been apprentice-ized yet. But the right nonprofit or business might come along and make it so. We want to encourage change and innovation in this sector, and we know some of our clients will make change happen.

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Do “child-care deserts” highlighted in the Washington Post really exist?

The Washington Post says, “A Minnesota community wants to fix its child-care crisis. It’s harder than it imagined.” Duluth City Councilperson Arik Forsman wants to solve the “region’s child-care crisis” and the reporter, Robert Samuels, vaguely cites “studies [that] have shown… more than half of the country lives in a child-care desert — places where there is a yawning gap between the number of slots needed for children and the number of existing spaces at child-care centers.” The link in his story leads to the highly partisan Center for American Progress website, which defines a child-care desert crisis using cherry-picked data to fit this definition: “any census tract with more than 50 children under age 5 that contains either no child care providers or so few options that there are more than three times as many children as licensed child care slots.”

Numerous rural census tracks are likely not to have any child-care providers, due to vast travel distances and low population density, but could still meet the low bar of 50 young children. The second part of the definition presupposes that most parents want to place their child in child-care, ignoring the reality that there still lots of people who don’t want their child in institutionalized child-care—they have one parent who stays home or who works at home (like I did when my kids, and S + A, were young). Some parents prefer to use family and friend networks. The cost of providing child-cage to infants and toddlers is very high—imagine trying to care for 30 kids, who are not potty-trained, and go on from there.

The “crisis” is based on specious data collected to make a political point, not address the actual issues. I know because we write lots of Head Start, Pre-K For All, and similar proposals under the umbrella of “early childhood education,” which is the theme for almost all child-care grant programs. Head Start is by far the largest publicly-funded early childhood education program and emphasizes “education.” Government funders always insist that child-care providers, including Early Head Start (birth – 3), focus on “education” rather than the custodial care model that largely disappeared 30 years ago. It officially disappeared; in reality, most children under age five are mentally equipped for play far more than they are for educational activities. Still, when we write a child-care/early childhood education proposal, we always state that the program will use the ever-popular “TeachingStratgies Creative Curriculum.” In this curriculum, even very young children are supposedly taught things like “pre-reading” (whatever that is) and other quasi-academic subjects. The typical “class schedule” for child-care programs, however, includes maybe two out of eight hours in alleged academic activities, with the rest of the day devoted to things like welcome and closing circles, snacks and lunch, hand-washing, nap time, outdoor/indoor play, etc.

Many contributing factors that come together to limit child-care options: just like with the affordable housing/homelessness crisis, much of the shortage of child-care slots is due to basic zoning rules (a topic we have covered extensively), as well as strict licensing requirements. In the abstract, most people support the idea of convenient child-care—until an actual facility is proposed down the street, and then existing residents think about 60 frisky kids whooping it up on their block, with fleets of parents dropping-off and picking-up kids. This type of proposal brings out the NIMBYs in force. They will use zoning to fight this “blighting” influence—and will usually win.

Also, ever since the hysteria over the fake McMartin Preschool abuse scandal in 1983, child-care facility regulations, even for home-based child-care, have become very stringent. While likely a good thing overall, this drives up the cost of operating child-care facilities. Even Head Start programs, which are fully federally-funded, have a hard time opening new facilities and keeping them open. All child-care programs, whether for-profit or non-profit, operate on thin margins and can be sunk by regulatory problems.

Then, there’s the challenge of finding and keeping “teachers.” Since Head Start was created in 1965, the open secret has been that it’s as much of a jobs program as an early childhood eduction program. The teachers, who might have a certificate of some sort but are rarely licensed teachers, are often the same moms who put their kids in the program, creating a sort of closed-loop system.

This worked fairly well until a perfect storm recently hit. As we wrote about in early 2019 “The movement towards a $15 minimum hourly wage and the Pre-K For All program in NYC,” this effort spells trouble for all child-care programs—the Minnesota minimum wage rises to $10/hour on January 1, 2020 and is set to rise to $15/hour by 2022. Staff costs make up the vast majority of child-care program budgets and rapidly rising minimum wages mean higher fees for parents, and they require larger public subsidies (which are not available in most municipalities). Ergo, it’s much harder to open a child-care facility and keep it open, even if qualified staff can be found. With an unemployment rate of less than 4% in the Duluth area, good staff are hard to find.

In related news, “Government Standards Are Making 5-Year-Olds and Kindergarten Teachers Miserable.” It seems that the bureaucrats who make these decisions have never interacted with actual human five-year-olds.

Nonetheless, we’re delighted to add the concept of child-care deserts to the equally ephemeral “food deserts” concept we often use in proposals. In grant writing, it’s not possible to have too many Potemkin deserts to add color to otherwise drab needs assessments. And many funders are more excited about solving marginal problems than real ones, like regulatory overreach and zoning.

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Coding school is becoming everyone’s favorite form of job training

For many years, construction skills training (often but not always in the form of YouthBuild) was every funder’s and every nonprofit’s favorite form of job training, often supplemented by entry-level healthcare work, but today the skill de jour has switched to software, programming, and/or coding. Case in point: this NYT article with the seductive headline, “Income Before: $18,000. After: $85,000. Does Tiny Nonprofit Pursuit Hold a Key to the Middle Class?” While the article is overwhelming positive, it’s not clear how many people are going to make it through Pursuit-like programs: “Max Rosado heard about the Pursuit program from a friend. Intrigued, he filled out an online form, and made it through a written test in math and logic…” (emphasis added). In addition, “Pursuit, by design, seeks people with the ‘highest need’ and potential, but it is selective, accepting only 10 percent of its applicants.” So the organization is cherry-picking its participants.

There’s nothing wrong with cherry-picking participants and most social and human service programs do just that, in the real world. As grant writers who live in the proposal world, we always state in job training proposals that the applicant (our client) will never cherry-pick trainees, even though they do. In the article, important details about cherry-picking are stuck in the middle, below the tantalizing lead, so most people will miss them. I’m highlighting them because they bring to the fore an important fact in many social and human service programs: there is a tension between access and success. Truly open-access programs tend to have much lower success rates; if everyone can enter, many of those who do will not have the skills or conscientiousness necessary to succeed. If an organization cherry-picks applicants, like Pursuit does, it will generally get better success metrics, but at the cost of selectivity.

Most well-marketed schools succeed in “improving” their students primarily through selection effects. That’s why the college-bribery scandal is so comedic: no one involved is worried about their kid flunking out of school. Schools are extremely selective in admissions and not so selective in curriculum or grading. Studies have consistently suggested that where you go to school matters much less than who you are and what you learn. Such studies don’t stop people from treating degrees as status markers and consumption goods, but it does imply that highly priced schools are often not worth it. Thorstein Veblen tells us a lot more about the current market for “competitive” education than anyone else.

My digs at well-marketed schools are not gratuitous to the main point: I favor Pursuit and Pursuit-like organizations and we have worked for some of them. In addition, it’s clear to pretty much anyone who has spent time teaching in non-elite schools that the way the current post-secondary education system is set up is nuts and makes little sense; we need a wider array of ways for people to learn the skills they need to thrive. If Pursuit and Pursuit-like programs are going to yield those skills, we should work towards supporting more of them.

It is almost certainly not existing schools that are going to boost more people into the middle class, as they’ve become overly bureaucratic, complacent, and sclerotic; see also Bryan Caplan’s book The Case Against Education on this subject. While many individuals within those systems may want change, they cannot align all the stakeholders to create change from within. Some schools, especially in the community-college sector, are re-making themselves, but many are not. In the face of slowness, however, nimble nonprofits and businesses should move where this grant wave is going.

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The movement towards a $15 minimum hourly wage and the Pre-K For All program in NYC


Over the last few years, the highly marketed $15/hour minimum wage has had remarkable success: it, along with the recent economic boom and historically low unemployment rates, have increased wages for some unskilled/low skill workers in some areas. Last week, though, I was developing a budget for a federal grant proposal on behalf of a large nonprofit in NYC. The federal program requires the use of “Parent Mentors”, which is another way of saying “Peer Outreach Worker.” So two full-time equivalent (FTE) Parent Mentors went into the budget.

“Peer” staff are not professionals—college degrees or formal work experience aren’t typically required. Instead, the peer is supposed to have life experience similar to the target population (e.g., African American persons in recovery for a substance abuse disorder treatment project in an African American neighborhood) or street credentials (“street cred”) to relate to the target population (e.g., ex-gang-bangers to engage current gang-bangers). In most human services programs, the peer staff are supervised by a professional staff person with a BA, MSW, LCSW, or similar degree. While the peer staff are at the bottom of the org chart, in many cases, they’re much more important to getting funded and operating a successful program than the 24-year-old recent Columbia grad with a degree in urban studies or psychology, as the “supervisor” is often afraid to go out into the community without a peer staff person riding shotgun. The situation is analogous to a first-year military officer who is technically superior to a 15-year enlisted veteran sergeant.

There are 2,080 person hours in a person year, so, at $15/hour, one FTE peer worker is budgeted at $31,200/year. If a nonprofit operates in an area with a $15/hour minimum wage, that’s the lowest salary that can be legally proposed. For many nonprofits, actual salaries for entry-level professional staff are about $30,000 to $35,000 per year. One might say, “No problem, just raise the professional salaries to $40,000.” This is, however, not easily done, as the maximum grants for most federal and state programs have not been adjusted to reflect minimum wages in places like New York or Seattle. If the nonprofit has been running a grant-funded program for five years, they’ve probably been paying the peer workers around $10/hour, and the new RFP very likely has the same maximum grant—say, $200,000—as the one from five years ago. That means one-third fewer peer workers.

If a Dairy Queen (I’m quite fond of DQ, like Warren Buffet) is suddenly confronted by the much higher minimum wage, they can try making the Blizzards one ounce smaller, skipping the pickles on the DQ Burgers, or buying a Flippy Burger Robot, and laying off a couple of 17-year olds. Nonprofits can’t generally deploy any of these strategies, as the service targets in the RPF are the the same as they ever were. For “capitated programs” like foster care, the nonprofit has to absorb rising costs, because they have a fixed reimbursement from the funder (e.g., $1,000/month/foster kid to cover all program expenses); we’re also unlikely to see robot outreach workers any time soon.

Most nonprofits also depend to some extent on fundraisers and donations. It’s hard enough to extract coin from your board and volunteers, so having a “New Minimum Wage Gala” is not likely to be a winning approach. Some higher-end restaurants in LA have added surcharges for higher minimum wages and employee health insurance, a practice I find annoying (just raise the damn pasta price from $20 to $22 and stop trying to virtue signal—or make me feel guilty). That avenue is typically closed to nonprofits, because the whole point is to provide no-cost services, or, in cases like Boys and Girls Clubs, very low-cost fees ($20 to play in the basketball league). Some organizations charge nominal membership fees, which are often waived anyway.

The nonprofit and grant worlds move much slower than the business world, and I guess we’ll just have to wait for the funders to catch up with rising minimum wages. In the meantime, some nonprofits are going to go under, just like this US News and World Report article that reports, “76.5 percent of full-service restaurant respondents said they had to reduce employee hours and 36 percent said they eliminated jobs in 2018 in response to the mandated wage increase” in New York City. More grants will also likely end up going to lower-cost cities and states, where it’s possible to hire three outreach workers instead of two outreach workers.

We write lots of Universal Pre-K (UPK) and Pre-K For All proposals in NYC and few, if any, of our early childhood education clients over the years have paid their “teachers” or “assistant teachers”—who are mostly peer workers with at most a 12-week certificate—$15/hour. There’s a new NYC Pre-K For All RFP on the street, and, if we’re hired to write any this year, the budgeting process will be interesting, as the City has minimum staffing levels for these classrooms, so staff cannot be cut.

Some organizations will get around the rules. Many religious communities are already “familiar,” you might say, with ways of getting around conventional taxation and regulatory rules. Their unusual social bonds enable them to do things other organizations can’t do. Many religious communities also vote as blocks and consequently get special dispensation in local and state grants and contracts. We’ll also likely end up seeing strategies like offering “stipends” to “parent volunteers” to get around the “wage” problem. For most nonprofits in high-minimum-wage areas, however, the simple reality is that fewer services will be provided per dollar spent.