Bill Stanczykiewicz is Wrong

In Monday's Indianapolis Star the head of the Indiana Youth Institute Bill Stanczykiewicz wrote an article that got my blood boiling a little. I really don't know Mr. Stanczykiewicz. I met him once at an event that I was leading for a United Way in Anderson, Indiana. I do read his articles and I'm concerned that he is a cheerleader for a way of doing things that does not benefit the people it is purported to serve. I stayed up late on Tuesday night and worked up a reply which I sent to the Indianapolis Star. I doubt that they will use it. So, I will copy it here in my blog so that it will at least be "out there."

Bill Stanczykiewicz is wrong. He is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. Perhaps he is right that “more opportunity today can mean less poverty in the future.” But that is unlikely as well. It isn’t “opportunity” that is the issue - it is income. He uses all the right buzz words to perhaps persuade someone that he may be right: “Education”, “opportunity”, “tutoring”, etc. How can you argue with all of these things? But none of his prescriptions or buzz words matter more than increased income. Not only academia, but also the Indianapolis Star has reported that income is the most important determinant in educational achievement. Doesn’t Mr. Stanczykiewicz think that at least one of the answers might be to find ways to increase income? The statistics he quotes from Haskins and Sawhill’s book are the type of statistics that can add more confusion rather than clarity to a conversation. And while these issues are complex a little common sense couldn’t hurt.

We have made the poor an industry that has supported people like Mr. Stanczykiewicz with nice salaries while little is done to directly increase the income of people who need it most. The energies spent on pimping poverty must quickly ebb to make way for a flow of innovation, collaboration and investment in people, not programs, to end poverty.

Stanczykiewicz may be right when he says that “growing up poor often means believing that success is for someone else...” The problem is that his solutions are more of the same. Haven’t the efforts over the last 50 years (and longer) taught us, at least, that the efforts we have made to “strike down poverty” haven’t worked? Then why do we keep on trying the same things and have the same people in charge of doing those things? Why I think that what he is saying is so dangerous is that we will continue to do these same things that haven’t worked and watch the number of young people and their families in poverty continue to rise.

The problem with the philosophy behind “Jobs for America’s Graduates” is that it does not take into account the failed model of building upon deficits rather than building upon assets. Any parent would understand this. We would never begin each day with our child by asking that child “so what’s wrong with you today?” But that’s how programs like these begin. Like good parents we could start with these young people and their families by asking - how do we build up what is best? Instead we spend our time poking around for every potential lack in their life. It’s a bad model for success in your home and it’s a bad model of success in our society.

When Julie Puttmann says “Our students realize for the first time they can make it” - I challenge her to name those students and then to talk with their parents and see if that is really true. I’ve lived and worked in low income communities most of my life and I can tell you that I’ve never met a person who “realized for the first time that they can make it” when they were in high school. Most young people have realized that from a very early age. Then they have their hopes dashed - not by their parents - but by a system and a society that tries to tell them that now thanks to this program or that one they can have hope for the first time. These programs aren’t bad things. They make the people who run them feel good. And they help a few people beat the odds. What our society could really find useful is something though that changes the odds for everyone. And for that we need innovation a lot more than we need programs.

Actually the 21st Century Scholars Program has modeled this for us. Over the last 8 years they have shown, by investing in the parents of the young people in their program, that a different way to approach poverty is by investing in the very people who the program is meant to serve and putting the actual working of it in the hands of the parents of young people in the program.

We need every part of the city and state challenging themselves to build on the gifts, dreams, talents, and passions of our young people AND their families. We need religious communities to start paying attention not only to “good works” but work that has good results. We need businesses that invest in our young, not by tutoring them - but by listening to them and investing in their good gifts. But what we need most of all is for each one of us to begin to recognize and celebrate the giftedness of our most marginalized citizens (liberals and conservatives are equally negligent on this) if for no other reason than this - it might actually work (and we have plenty of evidence that the other way doesn’t work). We see that evidence on the front page of our paper every day.

Rev. Michael Mather

Pastor, Broadway United Methodist Church