Look, another story where a foundation is accused of violating its original funders’ values.

It’s ridiculous to accuse the foundation. The funders violated their own values, the second they handed over their money to an organization set up to exist forever.

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Many moons ago, I listed the metrics we planned to use in evaluations. Well, here’s a shocker for you: when looking at actual charities’ activities, the reality is 10,000x as complicated as anything that can fit into these metrics.

We always knew we would run into the following problem: if Charity A saves 100 people from death and 1000 people from mild fever, while Charity B saves 150 people from death and 500 people from mild fever (assume the same cost), which is better? And we planned to tackle it in a slightly unusual way – rather than trying to “adjust” everything to the same terms (disability-adjusted life-years, or dollars of income gained, or some such nonsense), we would simply focus on how many lives were deeply changed. So in the case above, Charity B wins because it saved more people from death, and to heck with the fevers. Not perfect, but no solution to this problem is, and at least this approach is easy to understand and makes it easy for the donor to draw their own conclusions.

I reasoned that cases like this hypothetical should be rare anyway, as long as we’re separating charities into different causes (some aiming to educate children, others aiming to save lives, etc.) and only comparing charities when they share the same fundamental goal. For example, the charity that saves more lives is probably preventing more fevers too; when charities meaningfully diverge, it’s probably a sign that they belong in different causes.

Well, it hasn’t been even as simple as our messy expectation.

We initially wanted a cause to “save lives in Africa,” but we quickly realized that many charities are trying to prevent permanent blindness, debilitating skin disease, or a cleft lip that can lead to permanent malnutrition issues and ostracization. This isn’t exactly the same as saving a life, but doesn’t it seem pretty close? So we changed Cause 1 to “prevent death and extreme debilitation.”

Well, now we are in a pickle. What do you do when Charity A treats 10,000 cases of malaria and another performs 150 corrective surgeries? Now, bear in mind that malaria can be fatal; or it can lead to brain damage; or anemia; or it can just be a fever and stop there. And we don’t know how often it does each of these things (anyone have a source? Seriously, we can’t find it.) Now about those corrective surgeries. Some of them repair clefts (possibly, though not necessarily, life-ruining in the way described above). Others repair hand deformities or eyelid deformities, which we believe are usually cosmetic issues and not as bad as clefts (though how bad is the penalty for looking weird in these societies? We have no idea). And other surgeries are unclassified. Oh, and we don’t know for sure how many fall in each category – we just have to estimate based on past data.

How do you figure THAT one?

Here’s what I think. By default, I think the more comprehensive a charity is, the better. There are lots of things that make a community program – serving every need that everyone has – better than a narrower program (like running around distributing bednets). A more comprehensive program has tighter integration into the community, probably better relations with it, and better ability to observe it and make sure that people’s lives are improving on the whole (not trading some problems for others). On the other hand, there is exactly one thing that is worse about this approach – that you might help fewer people for the same funds. If malaria is cheap to prevent, running around and preventing everyone’s malaria could save many, many more lives than sitting in a village working on everything from AIDS to hangnail.

So, what I say is that the burden of proof is on the less comprehensive program to show that it’s getting much better results (same money) than the more comprehensive one. We’re still estimating our “dollars per life changed” metrics, using largely the same philosophy we started with – just focus on the really huge life changes – because we want to see if one program is obviously more cost-effective than another. If one program saves 10-100x as many lives as another (and I’d include cleft repair in “saving lives” for only this purpose), we’ll take our chances on it. But if it’s close at all, we’ll go with the communal/comprehensive program.

Since so much is unknown, that often makes things tough for distribution-type programs, but that matches with common sense too. If you’re trying to help people in a faraway land, you’d better be really confident to run around the countryside with nets, instead of sitting down in a village where you can see everything that’s going on.

So that’s what I’m thinking. Keep quantifying charity, as messily as we have to, knowing that we’re only going to use the wacky numbers we come up with if they show enormous differences in cost-effectiveness. Otherwise, we’re giving the edge to charities that work with one person/community at a time (instead of one problem at a time). What do you think?

Eduwonkette (if you’re interested in the cause of education, stop reading so many philanthropy blogs and subscribe to Eduwonkette) links to an exciting-sounding article about a series of innovative charter schools. Imagine how excited I get by a passage like this:

“On graduation rates, on test scores, on teacher pay — on just about anything you associate with school reform — we have kicked the district’s butt. There’s nobody in America who has taken the same kind of kids in the same kinds of areas and the same dollars and narrowed the achievement gap like we have.” …

It’s been six years since the 47-year-old Barr launched his personal variant on the charter-school formula, Green Dot Public Schools, then lured 500 kids (and their supportive parents) away from nearby — and academically disastrous — Lennox High School in Boyle Heights. To the consternation of L.A. Unified officials, Barr created Animo Leadership Charter High School with the aim of showing what he could do with $1,200 less per student than L.A. Unified and most big-city districts in California spend. His goal was to accomplish what California schools have failed to achieve for nearly 30 years: turn functionally illiterate and grossly undereducated urban freshmen into literate, math-competent, college-ready graduates who can compete with the graduates of rich-kid Harvard-Westlake.

Yeehaw! Let’s go! You’re right, I haven’t seen any other school that can convincingly demonstrate it’s pulled off this incredibly difficult task! How did you do it? Is it the hiring practices, the classroom protocols, what’s the secret?

Oh, and by the way, what is the actual evidence that you’ve closed the achievement gap for your students? From the way you talk, it sounds like you’ve just humiliated the public system – so you’ve been following your kids through college and seeing that they turn out just as well as Harvard-Westlake kids, or what?

Here it is:

So far, early returns from his 10 schools show a graduation rate double that of LAUSD’s sad results. While the data is too new to be earth-shatteringly conclusive …

Oh. Hrmm. Early returns … not conclusive … also, only graduation rates are mentioned, and of course graduation rates are one of the easier metrics to play fast and loose with …

And – oh dear –

Duffy has claimed that Barr selectively handpicks only four students out of every 10 in the neighborhoods where he opens a new school … ““We know they have the ability to [skim the cream]. We just don’t have any way of verifying what they do.”

So, we have a school that doesn’t admit all comers, we’re not sure exactly how they choose to admit students, they could be creaming and they could not be, and whether or not they are, their graduation rates might represent progress, lowered graduation requirements, or a fluke … and people are celebrating with grants and editorials about the end of the achievement gap.

In other words, I just re-read the ol’ article about NYC charters, pretty much word for word.

My favorite part of this one is this quote: “‘Eli Broad doesn’t write a check if we are marginally better,’ Barr concludes. ‘People don’t write editorials about us because we’re not successful.’” I beg to differ. Apparently, people write checks and editorials because in the absence of any school conducting true randomized trials and thorough followup, a couple preliminary and questionable stats plus some flashy rhetoric is what passes for both news and hope.

That’s where we’re going to be stuck until and unless an education charity not only figures out how to make a difference, but makes a good, methodologically sound demonstration of it. In the meantime, giving to an education charity with poor self-evaluation seems like giving to a cancer research laboratory with no pens, paper or computers.

Hey, the Gates Foundation is finally showing some interest in what others think. Here’s what I wrote in response to “Please share any comment or opinions you have about our web site.”

Not enough information. Not even close to enough information. Where are your evaluations & technical reports? Where’s your evidence for whether you’ve saved lives, how many lives you’ve saved, whether you’ve made any traction on education, what you think works in education? All I see is a list of grantees with 2-sentence descriptions (no account of how you choose them over other applicants) and a bunch of generalizing, salesy publications that don’t get specific about what was observed, how it was observed, and what specific practices you advocate. Glad you’re finally inviting feedback, because there are other people in existence trying to figure out where to give. As the leading foundation, you have an opportunity to create dialogue about how to help people as well as possible, and affect others’ giving as well as your own. This website does a great job burying that opportunity. Also, the look&feel is pretty drab.