Sunday Reading

This article in the New York Review of Books reminds me of the something that was going on in Peace Corps as well. The second half of the article deals with the influence of modern business practices on the American university system, but I found some parallels with some of the requests made of volunteers by the program managers during the periodic reviews that occur during service. One of the requests that was made of us was a count of total number of people assisted, which in my case, being a teacher, meant I would just count the number of students in my classes, then add the number of any students I was tutoring outside of class, and present that. I retrospect, from reading this article, I could very well have added any of the Outward Bound programs that I actively assisted with, though I am sure I did not do that, since I thought this exercise was pointless. Again, in the context of the article, I am able to see, that while I thought the exercise a waste of time, there was probably a bean counter somewhere who would compare totals between the various countries and determine budgets based on productivity, and this bean counter is the reason our program managers really pushed for everyone to be included, like those I tutored outside of my primary responsibility of teaching at the high school. Now, while I believe the end result would be of Peace Corps Romania receiving more money if those totals showed, via whatever formulas used, that Romania was a better return for investment than say Bulgaria. Remember, this is all hypothesis and I do not know for a fact that it the way the country budgets are determined, and even if it is, I do not know if after the budgets are set, if it carries down further, and increases the budgets of the various programs proportionally.

What bothers me a bit about this is that just because as a teacher I have a set number of students I assist directly, that doesn't mean others don't help more people by teaching skills to organizations that in turn pass those skills on. Since the volunteer wasn't directly involved in assisting the second generation, for lack of a better phrase, they can't include those numbers, even if those people were assisted while the volunteer was in country working on a different project, perhaps even with the same group they initially taught the skills now being passed along.

While I have no issues with accountability, I do believe that metrics for social service agencies are not going to be as cut and dried as those in the accounting world, or whichever sphere creates these metrics, might wish.

(Simon Head is the author of the article "The Grim Threat to British Universities" linked in the first paragraph, in case that link dies.)