The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (23 page)

Having seen too many young people die, Huberman felt that there must be a smarter way for the police to do things. He began asking himself what levers might be strengthened and pulled to make the police force more effective. The police could not do anything much to change things on their own; they were mostly responding to crime rather than preventing it. So Huberman decided to go back to school during the daylight hours and pursue master’s degrees in two wildly different—some might even say opposing—disciplines: social work and business.

Shortly thereafter, Huberman was promoted up the ranks to the level of assistant deputy superintendent of police. One of his first postgraduate projects was to bring the police force into the information age by developing the equivalent of an electronic medical records system. “Before this system, everything was done on paper,” he recalls. “If an assault occurred, the witness would say, ‘The guy had a tattoo of a bunny on his shoulder.’ The investigator would then have to go into the basement and spend hour after hour looking through hundreds of pink paper forms looking for descriptions of assaults, and try to find one or two that mentioned a bunny tattoo. It took forever to get enough information on enough suspects to form a lineup or to identify crime patterns.”

The force didn’t have the millions of dollars it would take to turn this mess into a real-time electronic database, so Huberman went hat in hand to the giant software firm Oracle and persuaded them to develop it, telling them that they could go on and sell the system
to other police forces around the country. Oracle took the bait and put in $10 million to do the work. Huberman gave them the information they needed to build it; a matching grant campaign pulled in the rest of the money.

The Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting System (a.k.a. CLEAR) has changed the equation on crime in Chicago. Today, when an assault occurs, the victim tells the policeman that the guy had a bunny tattoo on his shoulder, and tapping into his electronic device, the cop can identify likely offenders on the spot. Commanders can also strategically deploy officers to hot spots where crime is likely to occur. CLEAR has allowed police commanders to test their hypotheses on a regular basis. Are crime reductions, for example, better achieved through drug-related arrests, or gang-related arrests? The data show which police officers are most effective in reducing crime, and officers are promoted on the basis of that data. Today we believe that, partly due to this system, shootings in Chicago are down by two-thirds from the time CLEAR went live in 1999.

Cultivating Calm

After setting up CLEAR, Huberman quickly implemented similar systems in other large, complex, culturally complicated city government organizations. Following September 11, 2001, the day when all the big cities in the country were placed on high alert, Mayor Richard Daley decided to put Huberman in charge of a variety of big systems management challenges in very short order. When he appointed Huberman, Mayor Daley said, “I have utmost faith in him. I can go to sleep at night, and just close my eyes. I don’t have to worry about Ron Huberman.”

Huberman became like Chicago’s own version of Superman, attacking one big, thorny problem after another and saving the day
in each case. Huberman started with emergency management. His job: to coordinate agencies protecting the city from terror attacks, public health crises, and natural disasters—and figure out a way to handle the more than 21,000 calls to 911 every day. He created an integrated command center to coordinate all of the city’s resources during crises—a system that then US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called “revolutionary.” Next, in 2005, Huberman went to work as Mayor Daley’s chief of staff, where he was put in charge of rooting out city corruption and bringing accountability to city government. Then Huberman overhauled the Chicago Transit Authority, where he vastly improved ridership experience and renegotiated collective bargaining agreements for all twenty-one of the Transit Authority’s unions. In his spare time, he launched the largest ex-offender hiring program in the country.

All these systems relied on the same statistic-tracking, data-drilling methodology that characterized CLEAR. In each case, Huberman put together teams of like-minded, cross-disciplinary people in various departments. Together, they created detailed, measurement-oriented statistical tracking systems that often pulled in data beyond traditional government sources, and that laid out clear performance goals for people in every area of city government.

In 2009, not long after Derrion Albert’s murder and Arne Duncan, then the head of Chicago Public Schools, went to work for President Obama as secretary of education, Huberman took over Duncan’s job as CEO. Shortly after assuming the job, Huberman began attacking the problem of teen shootings. With the help of federal stimulus money, Huberman launched a program called Culture of Calm. The program targeted a handful of high-risk Chicago schools and threw every single intervention they could think of at them. Researchers scrutinized everything that put kids at risk of violence, from the way students were disciplined to the design of the entryways. Teachers put in more effort with at-risk students.
Additional school counselors were hired. Once the at-risk children received the attention they needed, the cultures of the schools began to change. But to really alter the landscape, something more was needed.

Enter Kanye West, the famous rapper and record producer. If anyone is a motivator for urban black kids, he is. A handsome, daring, outspoken, square-jawed black man who favors a leather skirt and a hoodie when performing, West has collected awards aplenty for his five solo albums, all of which have gone platinum; he’s also one of the best-selling digital artists of all time.
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Talking with Huberman about an incentive featuring West, we decided that an intimate concert with the superstar (who would give the concert
pro bono
) would really get the attention of the kids in the thirty-two most violent schools. So we offered the prize of a private concert to the school that would most profoundly change its culture for the better. Every school had its own Culture of Calm committee, and the competition among the schools was fierce.

Farragut High School, the winner of the prize, underwent a huge transformation as a result of the Culture of Calm program. Located on Chicago’s southwest side, the school’s population is roughly 70 percent Hispanic and 30 percent African American. Before the Culture of Calm program began, the hallways were filled with kids behaving aggressively toward each other—pushing and shoving, throwing insults and sometimes punches. The only adults visible were roving security guards who literally pushed kids through the doors of their classes when the bells rang.

Farragut High students started by forming a Culture of Calm committee comprised of student leaders—not just the class president and student council, but “influential” kids who played football and so on. It was this committee’s job to decide the basic rules, and they also agreed to two big, overarching requirements: a marked improvement
in school attendance and a reduction of violence-based incidents not just in school, but outside school as well.

Motivated by the competition for the prize, the kids went to work applying peer pressure. The incentive worked like magic. While all the schools in the Culture of Calm program showed dramatic reductions in violence and a boost in attendance, Farragut reported that incidents of misconduct dropped by a whopping 40 percent.

Of course, the concert, held in Farragut’s gym in June 2010, was fabulous. West brought along two other adored performers—Lupe Fiasco, who performed his hit song “Superstar,” followed by another superstar, Common, who performed “Universal Mind Control.” Then came West, and the students went wild. For them, it was an unforgettable night.

But as it turned out, the concert incentive isn’t what really turned things around. The opportunity to see West, in fact, merely legitimized what the kids already wanted: a safe place to learn. “They cared about seeing him, but even more importantly, they felt free to stand up to say ‘We want a safe school,’” Huberman says. To that end, the students succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. At all of the thirty-two schools in the program, the culture at the schools has remained calm. Teachers are in the hallways; kids don’t pick fights. And violent incidents such as shootings have dropped by 30 percent.

So was this Huberman’s only solution? As it turns out, this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Operation Chicago Public Schools Secret Service

A month after Derrion Albert was murdered, Huberman sat at a table in a school auditorium confronting a roomful of angry parents and teachers. They had come to tell him off for wanting to spend a
whopping $60 million on a two-year experimental program to reduce school violence, while the rest of the budget was being slashed to the bone. Some teachers had lost their jobs; others faced oversized classrooms. And parents of students who weren’t in danger didn’t understand why so much money would be diverted toward an untested idea for helping the “bad” kids turn their lives around.

Huberman challenged the assembly. “Which is more important—reducing class size or saving lives?” he asked. In a typical year, he pointed out, more than 250 students were shot and, on average, 30 of these shootings were fatal. As a former cop, he’d personally witnessed too many tragedies, and they’d gotten to him. Besides, he argued, kids in dangerous schools could not focus on academics anyway because they had something much larger, such as the possibility of being murdered, on their minds. After a shooting, attendance dropped to 50 percent. “If you are a logical, motivated kid, and a shooting occurs near your school, do you risk your life or risk falling behind in your classes?” Huberman asked. “And if you are a teacher at one of these schools, and half your kids don’t show up, do you reteach when the frightened kids come back, and slow everyone else down? What does it take to break out of this cycle?”

Huberman got his way, though plenty of parents continued to question his wisdom—arguing that the academic programs were being shortchanged. Perhaps the boldest aspect of Huberman’s plan was a program that would identify the kids who were most at risk—the ones who were the most likely to be involved in a shooting crime. The program would match an at-risk student with a highly paid advocate who, in Huberman’s words, would “act as mentor, advocate, and engaged adult who could serve as a parent figure to the youths.” To get the project started, Huberman asked us this question:
Out of 700 schools and 400,000-plus students, how do we figure out who is most likely to be part of a shooting crime?
He figured if that question could be answered, then the system could intervene
effectively. Without that information, the system would fail with certainty, he concluded.

So we set to work. First, our research team looked at retrospective data covering 500 shootings between September 2007 and October 2009. We wanted to see if we could decipher which factors put kids most at risk.
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What did we find?

The first factor may seem blindingly obvious: it’s being male. Race also plays a strong role, with Hispanics and African Americans pretty much running the same risk, but at a level much higher than Caucasians. And then there were the behavioral issues (school misconduct, past shootings, test scores, progress toward graduation, suspensions, incarceration history, and so on). Of these, the strongest predictor was having spent time in a juvenile detention center. This group had victimization rates more than ten times higher than that of a Caucasian student and six times higher than the typical African American or Hispanic male.

We also found that serious misconduct, absences, juvenile detention, and being over-age (that is, being held back a grade) were particularly detrimental for African American males, and suspensions and absences were strong predictors for Hispanics. For example, a seventeen-year-old freshman in high school was at considerably more risk than a fifteen-year-old freshman. Additionally, we learned that shooting crimes typically happened in the hours before or after school—a factor that explained why many kids who did well in other classes flunked first and last periods. They didn’t show up because they were scared of the gangs that congregated at those hours.

As it turned out, our filters were fairly accurate, especially considering a shooting event usually only happens with a small number of kids. Out of all the students in Chicago Public Schools, we found that roughly 10,000 out of 410,000 (or 2.5 percent) of students were at serious risk of gun violence. Most of these at-risk students attended
one of thirty-two schools in rough neighborhoods, were Hispanic or African American, and tended to live in poverty. Out of 410,000 kids, 1,200 students fit the model for very high risk. They needed intervention, and fast.