Dreams don`t come much bigger than the one Irving B. Harris dreamed. It went like this:
For five years, the family of every baby born in six buildings of the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing development on the South Side, would be bombarded with a generous assortment of services: home visits, medical care, advice on child development and nutrition, a supportive play environment.
At the end of the five years, the program would deliver to the local Beethoven Elementary School a kindergarten class packed with confident, healthy children, eager to learn-”like a kindergarten class in Highland Park or Winnetka,” Harris said in a recent interview.
The program, nicknamed the Beethoven Project, would put into practice what decades of research have shown: that to rescue inner-city children from lives of failure, the battle must be joined long before they turn 5-preferably before they are born.
It would improve the school by freeing teachers from the burden of coping with troubled children. In so doing, it would point the way to a successful reform of the entire Chicago public school system.
And it would gradually change the tenor of life in Robert Taylor, a long, gloomy cliff of high-rises between State Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway.
It would be the beacon of hope in the increasingly desperate fight to keep inner-city children from growing up amid despair and death, a fight that took on new urgency last week when a 7-year-old boy at Cabrini-Green was killed a few steps into his 100-foot walk to school.
But the Beethoven Project has found the desperate conditions of public housing a cruel and powerful adversary. It has not succeeded in reaching its ambitious goals. It has, however, touched some lives and given some children a chance at escaping poverty.
Harris, 82, a Chicago businessman and philanthropist who has devoted 30 years to supporting children`s causes, launched the Beethoven Project in 1987 with funding split between himself and the federal government.
The initial goal was to produce a class of 120 kindergartners entering the Beethoven School in fall 1992, then continue working with more children every year.
Instead, there are 20 of school age this fall, and they have entered a variety of schools, including Beethoven. In July 1991 only 159 families had spent between one and four years in the program.
Many families moved out of Robert Taylor, and, while some bettered themselves, the program lost touch with others. Of the first 100 families recruited, more than 50 percent have moved at least once.
But the low number of participants is also evidence of the magnitude of the task undertaken by the program, formally known as the Center for Successful Child Development.
Harris, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University who made his fortune with the Toni Home Permanent Co. and is now executive committee chairman of Pittway Corp., a manufacturing conglomorate, has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to find out why some children go to college and others go to prison.
In 1965, he founded the Erikson Institute, a graduate school and research center in Chicago specializing in child development issues. He has donated $17 million to the University of Chicago, including $10 million to the Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. He has also donated $5 million to the Yale University Child Study Center.
Research and reality
Studies done at these places and elsewhere have formed an emphatic chorus: To prevent children from dropping out of school, taking drugs, joining gangs and committing murders, parents must raise them with love, patience, discipline, optimism and a sense of right and wrong.
And the nurturing must begin early. ”The first three years of life is where it all starts,” Harris said.
The Beethoven Project was his attempt to apply research to reality. Similar programs had been tried on a smaller scale in Syracuse, N.Y., and New Haven, Conn., with some success.
But those studies were undertaken 20 years ago, when the breadth of today`s inner-city problems were unimaginable. Harris was taking on a monster- and the monster was growing.
”Everyone underestimated the violence and the drug involvement,” said Sydney Hans, a University of Chicago research psychologist who worked on setting up the Beethoven Project.
When the program was announced in 1986, there were 656 violent crimes in Robert Taylor. In 1991, there were 937, an increase of 43 percent.
The violence has traumatized parents and children, and made it difficult to hire and keep staff.
”We have to close down once a month,” Harris said. ”The gangs say,
`Don`t be here this afternoon.` We close and get out of there.”
Hardened resistance
The Beethoven Project proved a rough sell to a community hardened by years of watching well-meaning social programs come and go. Some people would not let the home visitors through their front doors.
”They never got past that we were another social service agency wanting to get into their business,” said Dorothy Coleman, the project`s director of children`s services.
To gain a foothold in the community, the project hired six Robert Taylor residents with no professional social work experience to visit pregnant women and mothers in their apartments and try to recruit them.
The home visitors` understanding of residents` needs have proved invaluable. ”Families have stayed involved because there was someone who came out to see them regularly and went with them to see the doctor,” said Enora Brown, associate director of program development at the Ounce of Prevention Fund. The fund is a publicly and privately funded agency founded by Harris that operates the Beethoven Project, among others.
But some home visitors were overwhelmed by the multitude and severity of problems they saw.
”It was like trying to send out a 10-year-old to guard Michael Jordan,” said Harris, who recalled that three of the first six home visitors quit after a short time.
Staff members found that many mothers were so consumed by such urgent tasks as keeping their children from getting shot that learning about child development seemed a frivolous goal.
”I don`t think providing a stimulating environment crossed their minds,” Coleman said.
First baby doing fine
Yet if the program fell short of its ambitious goals, it nonetheless made a difference.
The first baby born into the program (two months premature and weighing 3 pounds 11 ounces), Marshall Ray Jr., has just started kindergarten at the Beethoven School. He scored above average on a standard school-readiness test administered over the summer.
”He has a lot of self-confidence and follows the classroom rules well,” said his teacher, Deborah Simpson. ”He`s one of the few children in my room who knows all his letters and all his numbers. He came in knowing more than we teach in the first semester.”
Marshall`s mother, Paulette Blackshire, 39, has been hired as an assistant teacher in one of the Head Start classes at the Beethoven Project. His father, Marshall Ray, has married Blackshire and given up drugs and a life in which he was sleeping at shelters. He picks 5-year-old Marshall up from kindergarten every day.
”I wrestle with him, I play with him,” Ray said. ”Now I`m going to start working with him in drawing. I see he likes to draw.”
Another Beethoven School kindergarten teacher, Lahna Sligh, has not seen such dramatic results. She said the half-dozen Beethoven Project graduates in her classes seem no better prepared for school than other students.
The Center for Successful Child Development occupies the second floor of one building in Robert Taylor. There is a Family Enrichment Center featuring a play area where parents can spend time with their children in the company of child-development experts.
There is an area for sewing classes, and another room for parenting classes and parent support group meetings. A health care center staffed by several doctors provides prenatal and primary health care.
The Beethoven Project offers day care for children 3 months to 2 years old in an auxiliary space in another building, day care for 2-year-olds and Head Start classes for 3- and 4-year-olds.
Erlinda Tate, 28, the mother of four children and a four-year veteran of the Beethoven Project, says that her children are happier and more disciplined now and that she gets more pleasure from them.
”At first I would just take the kids out and let them do whatever they wanted,” she said. ”I read to my children now. We go to church on Sundays. I expect a lot from my sons.”
Tate regularly attends the weekly parent support group led by psychologist Pat Brady. In the meetings, Brady urges mothers to assert parental control of their homes, and wages a constant, uphill battle against spanking.
”I know this works,” she said. ”I am developing relationships with these parents. They start to believe, `Maybe my child can be more than I was. Maybe I`ll go talk to my child`s teacher.` ”
Over the next year, the Ounce of Prevention will test all 20 children who have graduated from the Beethoven Project to see how they compare to their peers, Brown said.
But Brady, a psychologist who has been testing Beethoven Project children for nearly five years, said tests cannot show the most important qualities in a well-raised child.
”To sit and attend to directions, to know it`s OK to make a mistake and say, `Can I try again?`-these things will ultimately make a difference,” she said.
The program`s successes have been subtle, but crucial, said Beverly Njuguna, director of the Beethoven Project. ”Parents are seeing their children as individuals and as people to be nurtured and respected,” she said.
Where are the kids?
Still, project officials have been frustrated at not being able to reach more families.
”People come in and say: `Why isn`t this place overflowing? Why isn`t there a line around the corner? Why isn`t your clinic packed?` ” said Coleman, the director of children`s services. ”I really don`t know, and it`s not because we haven`t been trying to find out.
”We beat up on ourselves that we didn`t reach hundreds of families. But if we only reach 20 families, that`s 20 families that wouldn`t have had that experience.”
Congress in 1988 authorized the funding of other programs that offer cradle-to-kindergarten services; 32 such programs around the country will get $47.4 million this year.
”I have never seen a more courageous project,” said Edward Zigler, director of the Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University, a co-founder of Head Start and a member of Ounce of Prevention`s national advisory committee.
”To tackle that kind of milieu, a place where the prognosis is absolutely the worst-you have to be very courageous to try. But you`ve got to do something about health, job training, the homes in which people live. You have to provide treatment programs for drug addiction.”
Zigler believes that programs like Beethoven cannot have a substantial effect unless society attacks these ills with the equivalent of another War on Poverty.
The commitment remains
Harris said his greatest disappointment has been the program`s inability to reach the most depressed and desperate of mothers in Robert Taylor, who did not have the motivation to enroll.
He has come to the sobering conclusion that society does not have the money to handle the huge numbers of troubled and sick children born to poor women who often did not want them.
”The best thing I can accomplish in my lifetime is to turn the legislature around and get it to stop forcing poor women to have babies” and resume state funding of abortions for the poor, he said.
Harris has donated more than $2 million to the Beethoven Project, and remains committed to it.
”We`ve learned so much more than anyone expected us to learn,” he said. ”Unfortunately, most of it`s bad.”
