January 26, 2007

Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions

Some of my friends want to help educate me, help me to know my subject matter better in the areas of poverty and also the nonprofit world. One of my buddies, Kyle Matthews, even sent me the book he felt I needed to read – The Cathedral Within by Bill Shore.

This book introduced me to the phrase above. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (SDIC) comes from chaos theory. “It’s the snowball that triggers the avalanche,” writes Shore.

Those who work with low-wealth folks understand this. One small hurdle leads to another challenge, leading to yet another problem and so on until an individual or family is covered over. This is the way poverty so often works.

But it can work the other way too.

Monday’s Birmingham News included a front-page article about pre-K programs in Shelby County. These programs are showing great progress – and great promise for the students who participate.

The Principal at Shelby Elementary is convinced that such programs bridge the gap between privileged and underprivileged students. Research reportedly backs that up. The News article also quotes Craig Ramey of the Center for Health and Education at Georgetown University, who reports that waiting until kindergarten for learning to begin leaves those students behind their peers. He says that gap will grow.

There’s that SDIC thing!

But the opposite holds true if pre-K is available. Ramey indicates, according to the article, “early learning improves school performance later on, reducing dropouts and teen pregnancy while increasing college attendance and full-time employment.”

So the SDIC proves out on the positive side of the ledger too – and in a big way!

This is just a very good example of how government can and does play a positive role in shaping our collective futures. We all want the kind of results that Ramey describes and, it seems to me, this is an incredibly efficient way of getting to those results.

The problem? Funding again. Alabama is providing this program to only 2 percent of our state’s 4-year-olds, spending $4.3 million dollars. That compares to $277 million being spent in Georgia, reaching 56 percent of the 4-year-old children there.

If Alabama stands a “snow-ball’s chance” of beating poverty, we simply need to give more support to programs like pre-K. We have more than a chance of doing that; results and research like the above will help take us there.

Happyness

I finally saw the movie yesterday – The Pursuit of Happyness – both because I heard good things about it and, honestly, because this story of one man overcoming the circumstances of poverty applies to our APP work.

It’s a good film, all the more powerful because it’s based on a true story. And Will Smith deserves the Oscar nomination.

The movie provides a good example of SDIC too. This guy, Chris Gardner, the determined father of a small boy, is going to do what it takes to provide. But over and over “the fates” seem to work against him. One bad break leads to another. One friend told me he got mad at how unfair it was that Chris has to overcome so much – over and over again.

But here’s one word of caution…as inspirational as the film is, and as much as we might admire Chris for overcoming his circumstances and eventually becoming a millionaire, this is a one-in-more-than-a-million story. It’s simply naïve to think that just anyone can duplicate Chris’ feat.

Yes, we all will benefit personally if we are dogged in our efforts to do better, but how much more would we all succeed if we do what we can to support one another in those efforts? Let’s not be so moved by Chris Gardner’s individual heroics that we decide to back out of the opportunities we have to help others reverse the snowball to avalanche effects of their circumstances.

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