Anti-drug program should be spared

President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget proposes to eliminate the state grants that prevent violence and drugs to 37 million elementary and secondary students in the country.

The $295 million federal program is called the state grants portion of the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities Act. If the program is eliminated, Georgia schools will lose $8 million, and most counties in Georgia will be left with no drug and violence prevention at all.

Safe and Drug Free Schools ensures that someone in almost every school district in America is responsible for students being safe from bullies, gangs and shooters and aware of the consequences of illegal drug use. It serves 37 million students.

Despite the fact that both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden signed letters in 2006, 2007 and 2008 supporting the program, it is now being recommended for elimination.

“It’s important that we invest in what works and don’t invest in what doesn’t,” White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said last week.

How do you measure the effectiveness of a program that distributes funds to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, six territories and 16,000 school districts?

Until recently the Office of Management and Budget used the Program Assessment Rating Tool, called PART, to attempt this Rubik’s Cube of program measurement. Once a program has been PARTed (actual Washington parlance), it is assigned an assessment.

PARTing, the intransitive verb form of to PART, starts off simply enough: Programs are either “performing” or “not performing.” Then it gets tricky.

Performing programs can be further rated either “effective,” “moderately effective” or “adequate.” Not performing programs can be “ineffective” or “results not demonstrated.”

PART bestowed the ambiguous “results not demonstrated” assessment on the drug-free schools program, indicating the program “has not been able to develop acceptable performance goals or collect data to determine whether it is performing.”

The trouble with these PART assessments is that they are sometimes meaningless. If something is adequate is it worth keeping?

“How’s that heart surgeon of yours?”

“Oh, he’s adequate.”

Hmmm.

On the other hand, if results have not been demonstrated the program might actually be effective.

Let’s say the Atlanta Fire Department gets PARTed, and the PART assessment comes back “results not demonstrated.” Do you eliminate the fire department because the firefighters were saving your house instead of developing acceptable performance goals?

The administration says the program is in jeopardy for reasons other than PART, but PART is how the program got a bum rap in the first place.

Congress is now considering the fate of the program. Groups like the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America are flooding Capitol Hill with letters demanding the program be saved.

They may have an ally in OMB Director Peter Orszag who recently announced, “I have said before, and I’ll say again, I think the PART system was well-intentioned, but was flawed both in terms of implementation and in terms of design.”

In other words, the Obama administration just PARTed PART, and PART flunked. Orszag said OMB is in the process of overhauling it.

In the meantime, the possibility lingers that a program that reaches all 180 school districts in Georgia will get the boot, the victim of an ill-performed and ill-conceived PARTing. Apparently what doesn’t work sometimes is figuring out what doesn’t work.

Doug Hall is president of Pride Surveys in Atlanta and has served as a member of the National Advisory Council of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention.