Gear Up is a nation-wide federal grant with billions of funding, intending to increase the proportion of minorities who match the criteria to be “prepared for college” (must have enough math credits, few absences, etc). It mostly funds after-school programs.

A while ago, somebody tried to make a database of all of the GearUp projects’ students, spread out throughout the country, in the hopes of evaluating the entire grant as a whole, rather than individual projects.

After a ridiculous fight with the project managers and principle investigators, we (as the new evaluator [think of us as nasty by-the-books irs auditors]) got access to this database, which is supposed to include the students who were offered services funded by GearUp, a pre-intervention test score of the students’ preparedness for college, a post-intervention test score, information on how often they actually showed up at the afterschool program, along with per-session information like tutors and attendance numbers and stuff.

Unfortunately, we discovered that the database has a couple flaws. A while ago, it seems that somebody was desireous of adding a new field to the database, but did not know how. So instead, they re-appropriated the ‘race/ethnicity’ column to serve the purpose of reporting the data “how many siblings does this person have in the program?” The “black” option, in the code invented on-the-fly, stands for “1 sibling”. The “Native Hawaiian” option stands for “0 siblings”.

So imagine our surprise when, after dealing with a truly staggering number of arbitrary obstacles (like “are you sure the project evaluator is allowed to have the project’s data? Doesn’t that violate student confidentiality? I refuse to hand over the database until I see confirmation, in writing, etc”), we weren’t exactly surprised that the database claimed, with absolutely no explanation, that >80% of the students served were Native Hawaiians. Every entry up to a certain year had had its race find/replaced into something else. After that, clearly some programs had gotten the memo about the new ’# of siblings’ code but didn’t understand it, so some entries have races of “1” or “0”. More than that, there seem to have been quite a few programs since then that ignored the memo about the policy change… maybe, or maybe their referrals just happened to have the right number of siblings such that their race came out correct.

I called one of my go-to’s, an 82-year-old black woman in charge of grant projects at the public high school she works at, who I’ve gotten to know as a particularly paradigmatic example of what your average federally-mandated grant project manager is thinking. I asked her about the GearUp database, and whether she had seen the “race->#-of-sibling” switch. She said that they hadn’t used the database in several years, as after the switch to the current system, they could no longer use the names of tutors/teachers/volunteers who had not worked for the grant before the switch. Apparently, in the data-entry form, the field for ‘who tutored this kid at this session’ used to be a text field, but was now a drop-down list of all of the tutors, volunteers, and teachers who had been in the database before. Thousands of entries for the nation-wide database, impossible to scroll down past the ‘A’s, and 82-year-old black ladies don’t know you can search a dropdown menu. Anyway, the turnover for the people actually doing the work in these programs is very high, so any project which didn’t have exactly the same staff as they’d had years ago could not submit any data to the project coordinator. They still received funding though.

I asked my friend if she had been keeping track at all of who was being served by the program. She had not. There had been an attempt to use a passed-around sign-in sheet (which could have at least been used in combination with the student database and 1000 hours of unpaid intern labor to recreate the necessary information), but that this had not gone over well with the students (it is extremely extremely low-status to actually *attend* afterschool programs targetted at minorities, apparently.)

I brought this issue to the one-man firm who had been hired to manage the database. He said that if a project needed to add a new person to the list, they should email him, and he would do it manually, but that the current system was the only possible way of getting standardized spelling on names.

These are just the problems we have run into *this week*.

Seriously, if you could do a better job than this, apply for a grant today.

woodswordsquire:

johnwhale:

I’ll say more on this topic eventually (my goal is to write up a full step-by-step walkthrough), but if you are reading this post, you are almost certainly competent enough to run a grant-funded program to help fix SJ-related problems in society today.

Grants are, in America, the actual mechanism of socialism. The government collects tax funds. The government notes a problem they would like to fix, or a metric they would like to see improved. The government makes a grant, a portion of the tax funds, available to anybody who applies with an idea as to how to fix/improve the problem/metric. Some of this money is set aside to pay an outside evaluator, who makes a recommendation as to whether the project should continue to be funded next year. Here is a cheekily-anonimized example:

The government would like to lower the rate of drug use amongst high-school aged students. The Department of Justice issues a grant for projects purporting to lower the rate of drug use amongst highschoolers. Chuck has an idea: get police officers to come to schools and regale the children with tales of the evils of drugs. Chuck applies for the aforementioned grant, asking for a reasonable $100,000 (paying his own $99,000 salary and using the remainder for cab fair for the policemen). He says the goal is to decrease the rate by 5%. The grant project coordinator at the Department of Justice reads Chuck’s application and decides to approve it. A year goes by. Chuck is reminded that he needs a project evaluator; he gets his brother to do it. The brother notes that Chuck was able to get policeman to give talks at ten high schools; he doesn’t know about the original 5% goal, and anyway he doesn’t have access to the data he would need to determine that anyway. He recommends to the DoJ that they refund the program next year, because it did what it set out to do (have cops talk to kids). The DoJ refunds the project with even more money next year.

Practically everything the government does, the actual mechanism is a grant. No Child Left Behind is a grant that only funds very specific kinds of projects and can only be applied for by public schools. Grocery stores apply for an EBT grant in order to get repaid for food stamps. Non-religious soup kitchens apply for a DoH&HS grant for decreasing the level of starvation among the homeless. Every year, NPR applies for a grant intended to make the population more educated. Every year, when universities get their Title IX money, it comes in the form of a grant. As stated above, the DARE program is funded by a Department of Justice grant that they keep getting every year.

I work for a firm that evaluates grants. The whole field is completely fucking useless. Nobody tracks data, nobody knows about pre and post testing, nobody knows about accountability. The whole field has been infected by rent seekers and is one giant Good Ol’ Boys club. Examples: a grant meant to reduce the dropout rate of highschool minorities ends up paying for a program wherein the minorities are taken out of their core classes and instead given tutoring on how to take notes. Nobody really noticed that the scheduling conflict put the minorities a whole semester behind in their schooling. The grant evaluator pointed this out as a possible flaw, but since nobody knows about data, nobody could tell how ridiculously harmful this was. Goals were phrased in terms of serving x number of minorities, not in terms of causing an x percentage reduction in the dropout rate, and when asked about this nobody involved could even tell the difference.

Most grant projects are like this. I deal in the realm of education grants, but from talking with my coworkers in other fields, it is *all* like this.

So I’m asking, nay, begging you, EA/LW/rationalist/SJ-oriented tumblr! Are you more competent than a slug? Can you come up with ideas that are marginally better than taking minority students out of their core classes in order to help them? The government will pay you to impkement them! It will pay you an upper class salary! And take it from me, if you take that money and blow it all on bullshit because it was your first time being principal investigator of a grant project and you didn’t really know what you were doing, you still did better than whoever *would* have gotten that money, so long as you didn’t do anything *actively harmful* with it.

Socialists! I’m a free market man myself, and most of the reason is because of what I’ve seen working in this field from about 05-07, then ‘14-now. All of this ‘socialism’ tax, as I think of it, used to pay for this stuff, it’s all harmful at best. But it *doesn’t have to be that way*!

Prove me wrong! Apply for a grant today, do a not-literally-evil job, improve society!

Next time I’ll post a guide to finding grants to apply for, because this is the hard part. But here’s a couple quick links:

http://www.ca.gov/grants.html California State-level Grants

http://www.grants.gov Federal Grants

(These are about 2% of the available grants. The reason this is such a good old boys system is because you have to know about the grants to find them, there is no general database.)

@slatestarscratchpad @theunitofcaring @oligopsony @sinesalvatorem @towardsagentlerworld (was advised to tag some people in the community i’m trying to reach)

I wonder if making that general database would be a high impact project?

Well, the reason there isn’t one is that many grants are written with a very specific project in mind, and they don’t want any other projects applying. If your brother is the only person to apply for your grant, then him paying himself 90% of the grant as a salary isn’t something you’re accountable for. Or sometimes it happens that over time a particular project wins a grant every year like clockwork, and eventually the application bidding process becomes a formality, so they don’t bother putting the grant up for public applications (for instance, the DoJ grant that funds DARE technically *could* fund other projects, and I’m sure it’s technically possible to apply for it and compete with DARE for that funding, but it’s impossible to find out what the grant’s parameters are because the information just isn’t findable.)

In other words, you’re relying on individual grantmakers to self-report, and that sometimes goes against their incentives.