Paul V. Smith

We are sad to announce that our cherished colleague, Paul V. Smith, passed on September 9, 2008. For more than 30 years with the Children's Defense Fund, Paul expertly and tirelessly led our research efforts, constantly devoted to ensuring that we accurately and creatively documented the needs of children and their families, especially the most vulnerable. With his passing, we have lost an outstanding researcher, a wonderful friend, and a superb advocate for children and the poor. He is survived by his wife of 45 years, Judith Smith, and his two children, Margaret and Matthew Smith.

Share with us your memories (and photos) of Paul.

Learn more about the Paul V. Smith Fellowship Program.

The following was a tribute given by CDF President Marian Wright Edelman on the day before Paul's retirement, December 11, 2007. As Mrs. Edelman said in closing her tribute, "You are a rare human being. We will miss you very much."

December 21, 2007 will be Dr. Paul Smith's last official day as head of CDF's research division, although he gently reminded me he is only one email away. It is nearly impossible for me to envisage CDF without Paul who has been a deeply valued colleague and friend from Harvard Center for Law and Education and Washington Research Project, CDF's parent organization, days in the early 1970s when the idea of CDF was being born. He was a crucial midwife at CDF's birth, designed the survey for our first study on Children Out of School in America published in 1974 for which I, Hillary Rodham and every single person at CDF, plus friends and consultants like Winifred Green and Oleta Fitzgerald, went out and knocked on thousands of doors in selected census tracks all across America. Its findings led to enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities Act.

No one and I mean no one—has done more to move the nation towards justice for children and the poor than Paul Smith. His quiet, self effacing genius personifies the "tech servant leader" (his words) sense of mission, institutional loyalty, and stewardship and excellence that undergirded CDF's founding values and enabled our growth over the years. I will miss his sermons that put the numbers in a moral context; and his pungent budget tradeoffs like his contrast of Department of Defense spending for vaccinations for the pets of military personnel to oppose the Reagan Administration’s proposed budget cuts for vaccinations for children. Children got their money back and the military pets kept theirs.

Obituary in The Washington Post.

Memories of Paul

"Whenever I'd send Paul an email asking a question about a number (such as how much it would cost, in relation to war costs, to insure children), he would almost always come upstairs and answer the question in person. He then would proceed to not only give me my requested number, but also explain every step that went into deriving that number, including a few side stories to add color. I often wondered why he went through so much effort for a lowly program assistant. He told me one day that he did this because he really wanted me to understand the numbers, not just report on them. My understanding and respect for data grew because of Paul. I carry his lessons and stories with me, and I am thankful to have known him."
- Malissa (Ortiz) Winograd

"I was a friend and colleague of Paul at CDF for almost 23 years. He has been an informal adviser and confidant. He was always jovial and upbeat and had a good sense of humor. He was very trustworthy and very kind and compassionate person. He was very generous to a fault. I always cherish his wise counsel. His depth of knowlege was so vast and I always enjoyed our numerous long conversations about life in generaland work in particular. He was always there for me everytime I need a good advice. I consider Paul as a man of great integrity, probity and honesty. I will never forget him."
- Orlando P. Bugarin

"I have this memory of Paul. I was in his office, sharing about some weekend trip I had taken which included going to some antique stores. I was chattering on, and mentioned something I had seen; some relatively obscure object, I honestly can't remember what it was. What I can remember is that Paul proceeded to talk about the object/its origins in a way that would make you think he had devoted his life to studying it. Another moment to be in awe of his amazing mind. How very blessed we are that this fine, caring, and brilliant man chose to devote and dedicate his talents to CDF and the work of justice. I know that right now, he's explaining something to some angel, and probably getting it just right."
- Robbie Ross Tisch

"Paul was one of the kindest, most genereous people I have ever met, without exception. He was my friend, advisor, colleague, and a good person for all the years I worked with him at CDF. He always encouraged, had a joke, and was a great listener. I cannot count the number of times he drove me home from work although he lived in Silver Spring and I lived in Adelphi, at the time.

He loved his family, his work, and was an unassuming and humble person who never took anyone for granted. His loyalty was rock solid and I never doubted his sincerity when he spoke. No matter how much time had passed between encounters, he was always the same Paul every time I saw him. He had much to do with shaping my opinion of how a really decent human being behaves and should behave. The world is a less comforting place without his presence, but he will make his present abode a much richer, finer place to reside. I wish him bon voyage.

My deepest sympathy goes to his wife, Judith, and children, Margaret and Matthew, on his loss. They have been so fortunate to have had him as a part of their lives for these many years.

Rest well, Paul, you good and faithful Servant Leader. You have earned it."
-Beverley Gallimore

Paul Smith showed us the way

Nearly forty years ago, Paul Smith was working at the Washington Research Project in Cambridge—soon to become the Children's Defense Fund—and I was working at the Child Development Group of Mississippi—the first Head Start program in the nation. We did not know each other at the time, but the battle for Mississippi Head Start would forge an unbreakable bond between us.

The CDGM Head Start program was also the largest in the nation; it had centers throughout Mississippi run by poor black communities, all independently funded by the federal government. That infuriated white Mississippi, so the program was under siege: the state wanted it shut down and its federal funding shut off. The governor of Mississippi vowed to block and refuse its funding.

Meanwhile, crafty friends of Mississippi Head Start had inserted a tiny clause in the federal legislation: when the governor refused the funds, they would flow into Mississippi under the control of a small black junior college, which operated the Head Start program as its community extension service. As Paul explained it, saving Mississippi Head Start was a classic case of judo—of the weaker opponent turning the stronger's own powers against him. The strategists had counted on the Governor's hostility; they turned his exercise of veto powers to children's benefit. Paul Smith was just such a judo master, a strategist who wielded numbers and facts and government processes as weapons for child advocates.

Mississippi showed similar hostility to disabled children, especially the poorest and blackest. Federal funds were provided to help guarantee disabled kids a free public education appropriate to their mental and physical needs. Instead, Mississippi was systematically ignoring and excluding disabled kids from public school, or segregating them into "special education" classes—that were neither special nor educational.

CDF decided to sue on behalf of the victims of this educational malpractice, disabled children and their families. The case was named Mattie T after the little girl who was its lead plaintiff. Dave Rice, my boss at CDGM, and I had gone to work for CDF in Mississippi, meeting with victims, demanding reforms, and gathering evidence. Paul was the indispensable intermediary between the CDF lawyers and field staff—sensitizing the former, and demanding legal rigor from the latter. We also turned to Paul to detect abuses of federal funds in state and county school budgets. They were as opaque then as collateralized debt obligations today. Paul would be in his element today, skewering bank bailouts while foreclosing on families. We always marveled at his talent for dissecting government budgets.

After the case was filed, Dave Rice and I moved to Washington to work at CDF's new office. Paul and I shared a big room, officially known as the research division. Paul called it the engine room, and explained our role as producing trade goods and ammunition for child advocates.

I use the word "share" advisedly, because of the pillars of books, news clippings, government reports, and computer data print-outs that surrounded us. Paul collected information with a prescience that bordered on the paranormal; for a treat he would take his little daughter Margaret to the secondhand bookstores and return with another armload. There were few visitors to our smoke-filled engine room—even the interns were fearful of avalanches. But a steady stream of analyses and reports poured out of Paul Smith's engine room to arm child advocates around the country.

Paul's judo mastery was most clearly at work when he took apart the budgets from Ronald Reagan to George Bush and shredded their ideological camouflage. Consider his riddle: What has eighty feet and flies first class? Answer: The US Army marching band. Paul's deadly humorous comparisons exposed the hypocritical motives behind budgetary attacks on programs for poor people; his jokes made the world laugh, then wince and react.

Paul always insisted that advocates should encourage government officials to express their views and policies fully—not just argue with them—and that we must present them accurately. He showed us it was far more effective to hang them by their own words.

Paul also tried to teach us one of his most valuable talents—how to read upside down and backwards. Woe to any official who sat down across a cluttered desk or table from Paul: he would soon vacuum up whatever they had lying around. And with his photographic memory, he could put it all in context and likely understand it more deeply than they did.

Paul would turn that intellect on whatever caught his attention—misleading government audits, the most audacious puns, computer programming techniques, automobile design and manufacturer bailouts, cosmological string theory, strategic lessons of history, animal behavior, nonprofit fund accounting, and more. The engine room was filled with wonderment.

One day I mentioned to Paul that we were having a serious pigeon problem at home, that we had even tried banishing the pigeons by releasing them miles away at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge—but that they always seemed to return. Paul immediately pointed out that we were just giving the pigeons a wonderful experience—a free meal and ride to the country and a chance to exercise their homing instincts. He guessed that even more pigeons would clamor to try it, and that they would return home before we could. He was so right.

Even on his sickbed, Paul was cogitating and strategizing. The last day I saw him, he called me aside and I thought he wanted to talk about a computer proposal I had made to connect from his hospital room to access data on his home computer. But he had other machinery in mind. Somehow he had learned that one of his nurses had always wanted to ride a motorcycle but was from a poor family and never had the opportunity. So he asked me to drive her around the hospital parking lot! As last requests go, this one was pure Paul—serious and playful all at once. How could I refuse? I'm going to ask his son Matt to come along.

Paul always showed us the way and outfitted us to explore it. How lucky we are to have known him. As long as there are battles for poor children, Paul Smith will be remembered. How we miss him!
- Shannon Ferguson

6,840 days ago I first met Paul in his dusty office that smelled of tobacco and was filled floor to ceiling with reports and books and computer disks. I remember wondering if anyone could remember all of that information let alone marshal it to create change society. Well: right away CDF's lobbyist Lisa Mihaly came in with a question about some puzzling homeless trends, which Paul immediately explained with an example from the housing market in the city of Antwerp in the 1600s.

Then he continued telling me about a report CDF was just finishing on the then-novel notion that young men's falling marriage rates were being driven downward by their dwindling job prospects. The draft report was fine, Paul said, but it was a little dry and needed something upfront, like a catchy quote to give it breadth.

Paul mused that that link between jobs and marriage clearly wasn't a new one. Who would have noticed that link, long ago? Obviously, Benjamin Franklin. When would Franklin have had time in his busy life to write this down? Clearly in the early 1750s. Paul reached up to the right bookshelf, pulled out Franklin's writings, opened them, and read, "the Number of Marriages...is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry."

That Franklin quotation became the epigraph for the report. Now I suspect that Paul knew that passage all along and was going through the motions of thinking out loud -- just to educate me.

Because above all else, Paul was always teaching us.

For the next 14 years Paul was my teacher and mentor. He taught us statistics and history and handy rules of thumb like always make sure your estimates err on the side that hurts your case - but also deeper insights. He was profoundly suspicious of generalizations and abstractions and nudged us toward nitty-gritty events and images: every X seconds of the school day a child drops out of school.

He taught countless advocates how to let numbers speak—be conservative, be creative, be concrete—and created many of the comparisons and phrases that advocates around the country use to make their case—and now officeholders and congressional staff and even the authors of census publications, little knowing it was Paul who gave them the framework for so much of what they do and say.

He taught that small can be as important as big; and that the powerless are more worthy of attention than the powerful.

For despite his stunning originality and exceptional brilliance he was the most deeply democratic person I have known. He would say we are techies, crafts people in a long line of crafts people. He lovingly evoked the Indian weaver women of Elmira NY, whose skills with automated loom machinery helped spark the early successes of IBM. Within CDF, he praised the inventiveness of CDF's support staff and sought out chances to train them into research-track careers.

His perspective, I thought, was not quite so much to look downward in compassion, or look upward in service to humanity; but rather to look at people straight on, in respect and identification and good humor. He was a friend to any friend of the forgotten.

I will miss him in more ways than I can count.

Moments

Every 21 seconds a child is born with the publicly-funded health coverage that Paul's work helped to expand.

"Every 37 seconds a three-year-old in poverty becomes eligible for the Head Start services that Paul successfully defended from malevolent 'audits' and whose funding formulas he helped rewrite.

Every day about 250,000 children in foster care are guaranteed government support in part because state fact sheets inspired by Paul helped rally a grassroots outpouring to defend them from being block granted in 1995.

Every day 13 million low-income children younger than 17 will receive greater income support from a child tax credit expansion achieved last week with the help of computer programming and advocacy techniques taught by Paul, and more than 150,000 of them will be lifted above the poverty line.

Every year the worst budget plans of lawmakers and presidents are exposed, and often beaten back, by being translated into concrete state-by-state, child-by-child numbers using formulas and phrases invented by Paul.

Every day a child advocate, researcher, grant-writer or speech-maker uses three-year average state poverty or health insurance data that Paul pioneered.

Every month, 1 right-wing pseudo-fact will be debunked by a researcher trained by Paul.

Every weekend 6 fewer ancient yellowing tomes will be purchased at the local used bookstore.

Every hour, a researcher trained by Paul will use the research skills that Paul ingrained in everyone he worked with—to be careful and conservative and creative in using data.

Every so often a brilliant human being is born in humble circumstances and rises to defend the most vulnerable of his or her nation.

Every moment we miss his deep warmth, ingenuity, honesty, wisdom, humor, and humanity.

[Thanks to Gina Adams, Marylee Allen, and others for good facts and edits]
- Arloc Sherman

Lately, I have been remembering the first time I met Paul. It was August 1973. I had recently graduated from law school and taken the bar exam in Massachusetts. It was my first day at the Children’s Defense Fund. As I sat in my office in CDF’s two-story wood frame building in Cambridge eager to begin my legal career, Marian swept in and gave me my first assignment: She told me to write the chapter on special education for our first book, Children Out of School in America, head for New Bedford, Massachusetts immediately with Hillary, Ann, Marlene and Cindy to knock on doors to find out how the Portuguese community was doing in the city’s schools, and then fly to Mississippi to spend a year organizing a class action lawsuit to stop Mississippi’s practice of expelling disabled children and resegregating African-American students.

After Marian left, I sat there with my head spinning. I thrived on being challenged, but this was way over the top. I didn’t know what special education was and had never been to New Bedford or Mississippi. As panic set in, a cheery, slightly disheveled, ruddy-cheeked guy with blond bushy hair and glasses peeked through the doorway and asked if he could come in. He introduced himself as Paul Smith, CDF’s researcher and statistician. He chuckled (we all remember his wonderful laugh) and with that twinkle in his eyes he asked how I was doing after my first meeting with Marian.

Paul helped me get through that period: teaching me what we were doing with Children Out of School, why I was going to New Bedford, what special education was, what a census tract was, and who Rims Barber was. Over the years he also taught me the difference between a correlation and causation, how to use data to build a class claim, and how to establish statistical significance. This may seem very dry to you, but for a lawyer trying to effect social program reforms through litigation, these tools were essential. Paul loved to nurture and train young lawyers and program staff and he was really good at it.

In the years before there were computers in offices, Paul was CDF’s answer to Google. Whenever any of us needed to know something real, a fact with actual truthiness, we went to Paul first, no matter how global or specific, obscure or arcane our question was. Paul would listen patiently as we explained why we needed the information and how difficult it would be to find. And then he would swivel his chair around, survey the piles of articles, reports, government documents that spilled from his bookshelves and were piled all over his floor, and dive into a pile in the corner. He seemed to disappear for a moment and then resurface, blond hair flying, with the answer in hand, loudly cackling: "aha, here it is Yohalem, now ask me a really hard question."

Paul had a passion for racial, social and economic justice, and for the fight to achieve it. Paul was not a geek, someone interested only in statistics and research for their own sake. When he talked about the way school districts used racially biased tests to push Black children into trailers outside the regular school building, his voice would raise and his eyes flashed with anger. David Stockman's budget cuts drove him crazy and drove him into the Pentagon’s budget to highlight the fundamental unfairness of Reagonomics. He saw—sooner than many—that tax cuts and budget deficits were Reagan's tactic for squeezing out social programs and he was the backbone of CDF's powerful response, first the Black Book then the Children's Defense Budget.

Finally, Paul was a genius. Not merely because he helped us all find the facts we needed, not merely because he was so good at teaching us to present data persuasively in human terms, not merely because he provided many effective affidavits that convinced judges of the validity of our data, but primarily because he understood and patiently taught each of us that in order to prevail in the struggle for racial, social and economic justice, CDF had to always be accurate on its facts. With so many opponents, credibility was crucial and, thanks in large part to Paul, it is CDF’s hallmark. From Marian's speeches to CDF's reports, lawsuits and testimony, Paul had our front and our back. I never worried about errors or exaggeration once Paul had reviewed a brief, testimony or chapter.

I have a confession to make. After I left CDF in 1986 and built a plaintiff's civil rights solo practice in New Mexico, I got Paul to help me on several challenging class action cases. I last spoke to Paul about a year ago when he yet again helped me figure out a practical solution to a difficult problem in a Medicaid case.

I loved working with Paul and I miss him already.
- Daniel Yohalem

Paul had been at CDF for a number of years when I began work there in early 1982, close to the beginning of the Reagan Presidency.

That period, of course, was a bad one for poor people and children, but it was a good one to get to know and learn from Paul. The flaws in the Reagan team in many ways were the polar opposites of Paul’s virtues. Their hostility to the poor and the powerless, their ignorance of the lessons of history, and their indifference to evidence and truth brought out, in the clearest possible relief, the importance of Paul’s commitment to the poor and powerless, his voracious appetite for historical information and connections, and his fidelity to accuracy and truth. I started to write that Reaganism gave Paul his voice, but it's more accurate to say that opposing Reaganism gave Paul a new cause and a new megaphone for his already pitch-perfect voice.

We all learned many important lessons from Paul—usually picking up as well, along the way, a great deal of seemingly extraneous information that somehow often proved—surprisingly to us—valuable at some later point. The lessons that were most revelatory in some ways were the historic ones. Paul's ability to put the research and policy into a context of historic continuity vastly enriched CDF’s work.

Advocates in particular sometimes come to these issues with an indifference to or contempt for the past. We passionately want to make the world anew—much of the past is seen as irrelevant or mistaken or even corrupt. To Paul the past always truly was prologue. He taught everyone around him how the work connected to the words and deeds of FDR or Harry Hopkins or Lincoln or Frederick Douglass or Grace Abbott, and how they had created a foundation on which to build.

Paul’s knowledge of history was encyclopedic. But Paul’s knowledge of everything, except perhaps pop culture, was encyclopedic. I used to describe Paul’s storehouse of information to my children by telling them that between us Paul and I knew all human knowledge—I knew 1 percent and he knew the other 99 percent. But then he went on to process it, integrate it and make it useful—that was his genius. He wrote compelling stories using data and budget analysis and history, integrating it all so that the underlying truths were clear.

Paul never took his 15 minutes of fame, so there were relatively few who got to benefit in person from his unique ability to connect data and history and ideas in these powerful ways that would occur to no one else. But everyone here knows that tens of millions of people who never met him benefitted and will continue to benefit directly from his genius and its profound impact on CDF’s work and this nation's policy over the last four decades.

Those of us who did know Paul personally will miss him greatly, but we carry with us what he taught us—how to care about the right things, and advocate in the right way. And because of Paul’s personal force and vividness, and moral authority, and genius, we will carry those memories and that knowledge with us always, and he will keep teaching us so long as we are doing this work.
- Jim Weill

In reading the words of my former colleagues (and other members of the CDF family who preceded or followed me), I smile at the vivid accounts of Paul, always the teacher, always content behind the scenes. I remember Paul as someone who always made time to talk. If memory prevails, he sat in the basement of CDF, and did, in effect, serve as a key part of the strong foundation of ever-growing CDF information and data. A true scholar and someone I admired for his passion, faith, optimism (and realism), and unyielding genuine nature, to be certain, Paul will live on in the memory of many of us, as will other great CDF heros who now keep him company.
- Naomi Tein

Please feel free to submit a memory or comment about Paul

If you have a photo of Paul that you would like to share, please email it to skoslow@childrensdefense.org or mail it to:
Sara Koslow
Children's Defense Fund
25 E St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20001