Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
On Friday I wrote about ReServe, a program that connects retired professionals to part-time jobs in nonprofit organizations or city agencies. Many ReServists, who earn $10 an hour, are working in city schools, including as college counselors in high schools in low-income neighborhoods.
ReServe is one of several programs that provide retired people with meaningful work. The giant in this field is Senior Corps, a federal program (a cousin of AmeriCorps) that puts nearly half a million people over 55 to work as foster grandparents, companions for frail older people or in community organizations. There is also Experience Works, which places older people in government or nonprofit organizations to give them work experience and training; the goal is to help them find paying jobs. ReServe is different in part because all its participants are paid, although the pay is low.
The program apparently made a lot of readers angry. Many of the comments focused on the injustice of age discrimination ― why shouldn’t older workers be able to keep their high-paying jobs?
More relevant to the topic of programs like ReServe, however, some of the most vehement readers argued that social service jobs shouldn’t be treated as appropriate for part-timers
with next to no specific training. “Is this really something to celebrate?” said Sam from Philadelphia.
“This drives down wages for those who do need the work.” Another reader, Elizabeth from Columbus, Ohio,
wrote: “By placing retirees in education and social service positions these programs create the false impression that well-trained, licensed teachers and social workers are unnecessary ― all
you need is love, da dadadada. Programs like this devalue the human service professions, drive down wages, and imply that the answer to rampant social inequalities is more volunteers.”
These reactions strike me as misplaced. No one is suggesting replacing teachers or professional social workers with volunteers. Instead, New York City is adding manpower in a way that should lessen the burdens on the professionals. Teachers don’t have time to do college counseling, or to help students fill out financial aid forms. But I bet every high school teacher who cares about her students is glad someone is doing that work. And the truth is that with money so tight, if quasi-volunteers don’t do it, no one will.
ReServists are also working in an ambitious new mayoral initiative to help New York City reduce truancy in middle schools. Angel Caba Fuentes, for example, is an anthropologist and former college professor who works with chronically truant students and their families at Paul L. Dunbar Middle School in the South Bronx. Three mornings a week, he and three other ReServists are in the lobby at 8 a.m. welcoming students to school, a list in hand of who was absent yesterday. He is not a social worker, but part of his job is connecting students to social services if they need them.
He also meets with parents. It helps that Caba Fuentes, like many of the families he works with, is from the Dominican Republic. “Many parents who come from Latin America are very poor,” he said. “They are farmers or workers and in their countries don’t have the opportunity for a good education. They aren’t conscious that education is a tool that can take children out of poverty. So it’s a vicious circle.
“A lot of times when I talk to dads they say, ‘mom is in charge of this.’” he said. “That’s wrong, and I stress that both parents need to be involved. Many parents don’t know that their children need to have good attendance. I let them know that this is one thing high schools look at. ”
One part of the job, Caba Fuentes said, that wasn’t in the description was running a snack bar. He and the other ReServists bring in fruit, bread, juice, and students come to their office to eat. “They say they don’t eat at home because they don’t have time,” he said. “I’d like to believe them.”
The program has been very successful at improving attendance ― a testament to the importance of human contact, whether or not the human in question has a teaching degree. “There really is no substitute for focused personnel,” said Benjamin Basile, the principal of the school. “When you don’t have bodies, it’s very hard to get this work done.”
The program has parallels in other fields ― health, for example. Some ReServists work in a program called WeCoach, talking to senior citizens with untreated diabetes and persuading them to get treatment. Mary S. Bleiberg, the executive director of ReServe, said that although preliminary research showed that WeCoach was getting very good results, it is shrinking ― there used to be 14 ReServists working in it and now there are 4. A similar program working with several New York hospitals to help depressed, frail older people was also successful ― but in 2010 was stopped entirely, as the hospitals did not make the program permanent.
These efforts have several things in common. They are all preventive ― spend a little now to save a lot later. And the truth is that they are jobs for which no one is ever going to be paid a professional’s salary. In education and social services, there is no money. The health work has a different problem: the perverse incentives of our health care system. As a nation, we’re better off if we can reduce costly hospital stays ― but hospitals aren’t better off. More patients mean more money for them.
The third common factor is that all these jobs are necessary complements to the work done by professionals. Doctors and nurses are more successful if there are lay people providing patients with support and encouragement. Teachers do better if their students show up.
It’s easy to think of similar jobs in other fields. The crime rate might be lower if there were lots of people working with recently released prisoners to help them stay out of jail. Pregnant women or new mothers who are at high risk for problems ― single teens, for example ― can benefit from visits by other mothers who have a bit of training. Peer counselors are the most effective people to help patients stick to their treatment plans.
As a society, we are very bad at prevention. Our elected officials tend to deal with problems only after they become crises. The political obstacles to providing effective early help for the marginalized in society leads us to spend a lot more later ― on hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters.
Organizations like ReServe make it possible for people to do this preventive work. But it really doesn’t require retirees, or even professionals ― indeed, with some of the jobs, professional qualification is a handicap. To work with recently released prisoners, for example, the best qualification is having served time yourself.
It’s hard to picture the politics aligning for this model to work on a wide scale in education or social services, programs run by government. Ironically, it could be better appreciated in the corporate world. I can imagine insurers or hospitals hiring forces of relatively low-wage and low-skill workers in these jobs ― indeed, they will have to, or they will sink. In the context of government, running a program like this would be called wasteful. Business has another word for it ― investment.
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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”