A Timely Policy Parable

Having read a bit of news that was intended to be hopeful this week, I keep recalling a Policy Parable by Dr. James Gallagher at Frank Porter Graham a number of years ago. He re-told it many times and each time it rang a AHA truth bell..

Imagine: there is a little girl who is very sick with fever and a sore throat and her worried parents carry her to the doctor who diagnoses strep throat and prescribes a 10 day prescription of penicillin. Within 24 hours, the child (and her parents) start to feel better! After three days, the little girl feels much better and her parents send her back to child care, still checking her temp and giving her the 2 doses of medicine each day. A week later, the little girl is feeling MUCH better, back to her old self and everyone is relieved this episode is over. Parents forget or forgo the last days of penicillin. When she gets sick again in 2 weeks, we can see the error in not following the full dose of medicine, and now, inadvertently, but surely, we have contributed to a more resistant strain of strep – making it harder to cure the next time.

This, Dr Gallagher would say, is what happens when we apply a Non-Therapeutic Dose of Policy. Just enough relief to tamp down the drama but ultimately not enough to fix the problem. And with the predictable unintended consequences, the problem is now better entrenched and resists easy solutions.

I fear this where we are in the “child care crisis”. Our non-therapeutic dose of federal monies is over, and the smaller gestures aren’t up to the job, but they feel like we are doing something. We have been in this cycle for a long time. A financial analysis 10 years ago concluded that the way to fix the compensation problem was to pay child care teachers a wage commensurate with their responsibilities. Imagine that.