No Reform
Welfare reform, as conceived by the governor and strongly advocated -- surprisingly -- by the secretary of human resources, has been laid to rest at least temporarily.
The proposal put forth by Gov. William Donald Schaefer would have denied additional payments to mothers who conceived and gave birth to children while receiving aid to families with dependent children. Many view this as punitive, since children would be the ones adversely affected.
Secretary Carolyn Colvin would be better advised to lend her efforts to helping these women receive family planning in order to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Even so, according to data published earlier, only about 6 percent of AFDC mothers have additional children. And in all likelihood this proportion would be much lower had these women received family planning help.
True, the legislature enacted a doomed-to-failure bill establishing a pilot program that would cancel assistance to recipients failing to find employment or perform community service (whatever that is) after 18 months on aid.
As Kalman Hettleman, a knowledgeable former administrator in the public assistance field, pointed out in The Sun's Opinion * Commentary page of March 22, such endeavors have been tried in the past with a singular lack of success.
Even though hundreds of clients finished job training, employment was not available. Nor does this proposal take into consideration the many teen-age mothers who are left floundering with a responsibility that they are ill-equipped to meet.
A more constructive and certainly much more positive approach to welfare reform was espoused in Sara Engram's March 24 column: Upon application a family's situation would be thoroughly explored. It would be given counseling about family planning and a realistic course of action for getting off welfare.
Specialists in the field have in the past made similar recommendations, but these have never gotten off the launching pad.
Funding officials have little enthusiasm for such proposals, being wary of initial outlays for the costs of reduced case loads, skilled social workers and additional resources. Better to stick the thumb in a porous dike than to make permanent repairs.
Abner Kaplan
Baltimore
Benchmarking
The column by Neil Peirce, April 11, on the benchmarking of government describes the Oregon system as benchmarking borrowed from the corporate world. In fact what Oregon is doing is quite different in principle and probable outcome.
Corporate benchmarking (developed by Xerox) is finding the best practices anywhere and adopting their methods and quantitative achievements as your benchmark. Your new goals. This approach has produced unprecedented improvements in operations and customer satisfaction.
The Oregon so-called benchmark approach is goal-setting by the internal organization. The only thing new about it, as Mr. Peirce describes, is that the government agencies are focusing on outcomes instead of inputs. The state has enacted into law the goals established.
It sounds like progress, but I believe many will be disappointed. Internally set goals will not match those set by the corporate approach.
The main reason is that organizations have no sound basis for setting improvement goals when they don't know how they will achieve them.
True benchmarking bypasses this limitation. The very process of finding another organization that performs similar functions more effectively demonstrates that it can be done better and by how much.
This overcomes resistance to change. How can you argue with the facts? I see Oregon cultivating another bureaucratic morass. Corporate America has been shifting from this management by objectives approach because it doesn't work.
Thomas J. Cartin
Annapolis
Regional Business
In his April 2 column, "No Guts, No Regional Glory," Patrick Ercolano really missed a key opportunity to accurately reflect the facts about one of this region's most ambitious and worthwhile programs, the Greater Baltimore Alliance, the new economic development initiative founded by the Baltimore Metropolitan Council.
The facts are these. The alliance, founded only eight months ago, is the most successful regional economic development program Baltimore has known.
It is a unique partnership of the public, private and non-profit sectors, which have come together to promote the riches and resources of the metropolitan area. Its members are keenly aware that each jurisdiction's gain is the region's victory.
On-going projects include a national media placement effort about positive events in the region (which has already shown significant results), a direct-mail program to site location consultants nationwide, production of a regional data book, a major market research effort targeted at CEOs nationally, a practiced and perfected follow-up program for handling qualified leads, a presence at trade shows and select events and education/awareness-building events for local business and civic leaders. Boosterism must begin in our own community before we can expect it to spread nationally.
So impressive is this program that major funders from the private and non-profit sectors have stepped forward to ensure that the alliance puts the Baltimore region on the map as a viable place to do business.
Charles Krautler
Baltimore
The writer is the executive director of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council.
University Work and Its Critics
I don't know what happens at College Park, but as a professor at Towson State University for the last 17 years, I can assure you that my classes do not afford me much leisure, as your editorial of March 30 asserted.
The guidelines of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) stipulate that the maximum teaching load for instructors at teaching institutions such as Towson State should be eight courses a year. The Sun reported that the average teaching load at Towson is seven, one short of the maximum allowed.
Who does not regularly teach the eight-course maximum? Only the heads of departments and the directors of major programs.
If the state were to insist that all faculty must teach eight courses, the university would have to hire administration to run the departments.
There would be no savings. The advantage would be that The Sun and politicians could gloat that they had squeezed a little extra work from state employees who haven't been given raises in several years.
Your editorial incorrectly stated that professors "teach between 9.5 and 10.5 hours a week."
True, I am in the classroom only 12 hours a week, but clearly the editors of The Sun realize that the time spent in the classroom is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to teaching.
I meet with students all day, helping them with papers and giving them information about courses and graduate schools.
I advise student organizations; I take part in student-run programs. All of these time-consuming activities are part of teaching.
Moreover, as an English professor, I spend hours each week correcting papers. High school teachers have for decades been so swamped by students that most freshmen come to college without the careful individual instruction necessary to make them grammatical or effective writers of English.
I teach over 100 hundred students each semester. Were I to teach more students or more courses, I could not give them the careful, individual attention they deserve.
I have not yet mentioned keeping up in my fields. I read -- or try to read -- at least one book a week related to the courses I am teaching or plan to teach. (Like many of my colleagues at Towson, I am also the author or editor of several books.)
Teachers at Towson are teaching already at the maximum allowed by the AAUP. We have been doing so without adequate compensation and without adequate material support.
The penny-pinching, nickel-and-diming politicians who destroyed grade school education are now trying to do the same thing to the state universities.
And The Sun, instead of fighting against such know-nothingism, is abetting it by taking this parsimonious anti-intellectual position.
Instead of attacking Towson State University, which gives students a remarkably good education despite the economic pressures it works under, The Sun should be asking how can we make sure that Maryland has the finest possible state university system.
David Bergman
Towson