THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

For Marian Wright Edelman, the youngest daughter of a Baptist preacher, from adversity springs strength. From defeat comes inspiration. If her courage ever fails her, she is not about to say so. Life as she lives it day by day is a series of battles fought along starkly moral lines. That is why Edelman--who helped register black voters in the segregated South, who stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and who gave Robert Kennedy a personal tour to see the malnourished children in the Mississippi Delta--is manning the barricades once more.

As the president of the Children's Defense Fund, she has for nearly 25 years been the single loudest voice on behalf of those too young to speak for themselves. But to hear her tell it, the test of her mettle is now. "I knew it would take 20 years, 25 years to seed a movement," she says. "You just have to keep planting and watering and fertilizing. And then, when it is time, you do what you have to do. But you have to stand up--win, lose or draw. And it's time."

Edelman has summoned Americans to a rally at the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday to Stand for Children. Like the Million Man March, the event is less about defining an agenda than it is about evoking a spirit--and filling what organizers see as a terrifying vacuum of leadership and resolve at a time when every premise about what this country owes its children is being challenged. "Children are never going to get what they need until there is a fundamental change in the ethos that says it is not acceptable to cut children first," says Edelman of the current budget battles in Washington. She hopes to use this period of fiscal conflict to mobilize the troops. "God really did put rainbows in the clouds," she says. "Without Newt Gingrich and the incredible threat to everything, we would never have been able to bring folks together in this way. So, in many ways this is the thing that will launch the children's movement."

Unlike the civil rights movement, however--or for that matter the seat-belt, drunk-driving and environmental movements, all of which have changed the way Americans live--the children's movement is more like a series of spasms than a focused, well-coordinated effort. True, when a Polly Klaas or Megan Kanka is abducted and murdered, or when Elisa Izquierdo falls through the gaping holes in New York City's social-services system, outraged parents and community leaders can rear up, roar and carry the day for "three strikes" or Megan's Law. And in the endless wrangle over welfare reform, which hit the headlines again last week, children have proved to be a deal breaker. "I can win any argument by saying we need reform of welfare, but not at the cost of kids," says Senator Edward Kennedy, who derailed Bob Dole's welfare proposal by branding it the "home alone" bill because there was no money specifically targeted for child care.

Even so, despite activism by Edelman and her allies, most political leaders still don't do what she wants them to do: ask, every time they cast a vote or cut a dollar, "How will this affect kids?" And even if they did, they would not necessarily answer the question Edelman's way because of the growing sense, embraced by both major presidential candidates, that government has its limitations. "Read between the lines of everything Marian Wright Edelman says, and what you get is this," says Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "The problem affecting kids is material poverty, so if we give the family more money for housing and food, things will turn out better for the kids. The reality is that despite 30 years of this effort, there is no evidence whatsoever that [this] has a positive effect on kids at all, except for cases of gross malnutrition."

In the broadest sense, Edelman's positions are extremely popular. Who, after all, would ever stand against children? In a recent TIME/CNN poll, 73% of those surveyed favor having more of their tax dollars go to programs that benefit the young. For the most part, that sentiment has proved beneficial. Since Edelman launched the Children's Defense Fund in 1973, American children are doing better in such areas as math and science proficiency, immunizations and infant survival rates, thanks in part to government action.

But as America polarizes into a land of rich and poor, the number of children on the losing side is growing at an alarming rate. According to a report released last month by the Department of Health and Human Services, the percentage of children in "extreme poverty" (with a family income less than half the official poverty level) has doubled since 1975: it now stands at 10%, or 6.3 million children. The ranks of the merely poor include 1 in every 5 children in the U.S. In 1992 there were 850,000 substantiated cases of child abuse or neglect, while the homicide rate for teens more than doubled between 1970 and 1992.

Such numbers are not just a snapshot of how we live today. To experts who understand the trajectory of childhood development, the statistics predict a grim future for American society. As Douglas Nelson, executive director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, puts it, "It may well be that the nation cannot survive--as a decent place to live, as a world-class power or even as a democracy--with such high rates of children growing into adulthood unprepared to parent, unprepared to be productively employed and unprepared to share in mainstream aspirations."

The Children's Defense Fund works to fix this disconnect between what Americans say they want for children and what they actually do for them. With offices just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, the Defense Fund stands out among youth advocacy groups for its Washington-based organization and strategic coalitions, its many alliances with state and local groups, and its many service-oriented programs. In the District of Columbia, the Defense Fund has established City Lights, which works with severely troubled adolescents. At what was once the Tennessee farm of Roots author Alex Haley, the Fund conducts leadership training sessions. And, often in partnership with Junior Leagues, it runs public-education programs throughout the country, exposing business and community leaders to the problems of the young. In the mid-1980s, the Children's Defense Fund helped focus national attention on the problem of teen pregnancy. In the late '80s, it put together a coalition that was instrumental in the 1990 passage of a multibillion-dollar child-care bill for low-income working parents.

Edelman learned early that you have to play politics to change lives. When Head Start funds were made available to the states in 1965, for example, Mississippi did not sign up. But a group of public, private and church organizations, with Edelman on its board, applied for the money and saw Head Start become a powerful catalyst in the state's black community. When then Senator John Stennis tried to get Congress to cut off its funding, Edelman, at that point 25, went to Washington to fight back--and won. "This was my first big lesson about government," she says. "There was no one in Washington for these folks, like General Motors had. That was seed No. 1 for the Children's Defense Fund." In the 1970s, Edelman helped defeat a proposal to turn Head Start funding over to the states. Today, with devolution again the coin of the realm, Edelman, a child of the segregated South, remains deeply skeptical that all states will voluntarily care for their neediest citizens. "Where you can see a general need everywhere," she contends, "you try to have a national solution."

As she travels around the country stirring up support for the march in Washington, Edelman talks about "the silence of good people about the injustice of it all." By this she means, in large part, her old friend the President. Marian and her husband, Peter Edelman, a lawyer whom she met when he was an adviser to Bobby Kennedy, have known the Clintons for many years. Mrs. Clinton worked as a lawyer for the Children's Defense Fund, resigning from the board when she became First Lady. In August 1995, the President almost nominated Peter, who currently works for the Department of Health and Human Services, to the federal district court in Washington, changing his mind at the last minute, fearing he was too liberal. Last fall, as Edelman watched the welfare battle take shape, she privately implored the President not to compromise federal standards. When Clinton nevertheless signaled his support for a Senate bill that would transform federal welfare spending into a system of smaller, block grants to the states--thereby eliminating the safety net of protections that children have, regardless of which state they live in--Edelman spoke out.

In "An Open Letter to the President," which ran last Nov. 3 in the Washington Post, Edelman urged Clinton to oppose welfare and Medicaid block grants. She wrote, "Do you think the Old Testament prophets, Isaiah, Micah and Amos--or Jesus Christ--would support such policies?" If he were to let federal protections go, she warned, "we may not get them back in our lifetime or our children's." She concluded: "What a tragic irony it would be for this regressive attack on children and the poor to occur on your watch. For me, this is a defining moral litmus test for your presidency." In the end, Clinton withdrew his support for the bill, perhaps in part because he was shamed by his old friend, but also because it was good politics to do so. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had forced the White House to disclose its estimate that more than 1 million additional children would be thrown into poverty by the Senate measure. (The Clintons and the Edelmans remained friends. Peter rode Air Force One to Yitzhak Rabin's funeral last fall and stayed up most of the night playing hearts with the President on the trip home.)

The word moral appears seven times in Edelman's letter, and the certitude with which she plunges ahead is both her greatest strength and her greatest flaw. What looks like "morality" to her is merely discredited 1960s liberalism to others. Her opponents believe that all of Edelman's big talk about children masks her true goal: to solve the problems of poverty--for people of all ages--through the expenditure of federal money. While most Americans agree children deserve extra help, when policymakers start talking about solutions they speak completely different languages. "As long as liberals talk about economics and government and conservatives talk about culture and values, there will never be a political debate that reaches a successful conclusion," says William Galston, a former domestic-policy adviser in the Clinton White House.

The unshakable conviction that they have God on their side may also help explain why advocates for children are not more effective lobbyists. A 1995 report on how state legislative leaders view children's issues and the people who come to lobby on their behalf discovered a vast chasm of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Few of the 177 legislative leaders who were interviewed could identify by name the children's-advocacy organizations in their states. Many complained that those who ask them to act on behalf of children do not understand the legislative process and tend to arrive too late in the budget cycle. Says Michael Iskowitz, Senator Kennedy's aide on children's issues: "Just expecting people to do the right thing is often not enough. You have to give them a range of arguments about why it is in their interest."

Chief among those arguments are votes and money, yet the study found that children's advocates rarely work in political campaigns or contribute to candidates. Worse still, they have little organized, grass-roots support. "[The legislators] are not getting calls in their office asking, 'What are you doing for kids?'" says Margaret Blood, who ran the study. Even some of Edelman's supporters acknowledge this has been a problem with her work. "CDF has been enormously effective on a national level," says Eve Brooks, president of the National Association of Child Advocates. "It has been less effective in building a constituency that stays in place."

It is a truism that children can't vote, but Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of When the Bough Breaks: The Costs of Neglecting Our Children, has discovered that their parents don't vote either. In the last national election, only 39% of adults with children at home cast a ballot, as compared with 61% of the elderly. During the 1950s, says Hewlett, who runs a nonprofit organization aimed at getting parents to the polls, 65% of parents voted.

In their interviews, the legislators indicated that if children's advocates are to be effective, they will need to organize themselves more like the National Rifle Association and the American Association for Retired Persons--with well-defined goals, politically active members, and lobbyists who work throughout the entire legislative session. (The Children's Defense Fund operates on an annual budget of $13 million, compared with $66 million for the N.R.A.; AARP has annual revenues of $300 million.)

The latter comparison is particularly apt since the elderly may have strengthened their own safety net at the expense of the young. "Is there a disproportionate amount of money being spent on people over the age of 65 versus under the age of three?" asks one legislative leader. "Yes, unquestionably. Is it in part a function of their lobbying efforts? Yes, unquestionably. Is it largely a function of their need? No, it is not." Yet as Ira Schwartz, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, notes, "Seniors and those in the work force don't understand that the survival of the Social Security system is really dependent on the future of our children." Or perhaps they do: aarp has endorsed the Stand, in part, says spokesman Peter Ashkenaz, because so many grandparents are rearing children.

In the end, the most pressing question for children's advocates is the one that Saturday's march intentionally sidesteps: setting a common agenda. It is a daunting task, not just because children's issues are so numerous and so fragmented, but because no one is certain what solutions, if any, will work. Even people committed to reducing teen pregnancy may disagree vehemently about the means to that end. Some feel that social trends like no-fault divorce pose the greatest threat to children.

"One of the biggest problems we have is that it's so hard to show results," says Frank Sanchez Jr., who runs delinquency-prevention programs for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. The child who doesn't get into trouble is the dog that doesn't bark. "We don't have a lot of studies to build a broad, knowledgeable base," agrees Kristin Moore, executive director of the research firm Child Trends Inc., because most of the efforts to help kids are "too late, too shallow, too brief and too cheap."

Among some children's advocates, enthusiasm has faded for homegrown, experimental approaches. In 1988 Lisbeth Schorr and her husband, National Public Radio's Daniel Schorr, wrote Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage, which enthusiastically described 24 new programs for children. Today half of them are gone, and Schorr has had a change of heart about what such initiatives can accomplish. "Foundations fund innovative programs for several years with the idea that when they work, public funds will pick up the cost and continue the program," she says. "But that hasn't happened for years. It's an illusion. Anything you want to do in an organized way, a big way, needs government funding." Adds Vivien Stewart of the Carnegie Foundation: "In this country we are very good at pilot programs, but we are very bad at scaling up to a point where we can actually turn some of these things around. It can't be done with the resources of small organizations."

Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, could not disagree more. Originator of the "charity tax credit" endorsed by Bob Dole last week, Coats believes "federal programs have almost become an excuse for people not to become personally involved." A tax credit that allows people to support local social initiatives, he contends, would keep both donor and recipient accountable. "If you want to know that your money is really going to make a difference," he asks, "would you rather give $1,000 to Habitat for Humanity or to HUD?" Yet one study that Catholic Charities cited in Senate testimony earlier this year estimates that private giving in the year 2000 would have to be 50 times greater than it has been to replace government support for social services.

The Coats thesis notwithstanding, many of the nonprofit groups that work with children have rallied to Edelman's call. Her Stand for Children has been endorsed by almost 3,000 organizations. Thousands of Girl Scouts are expected to attend, as well as thousands more teachers and members of the ywca and the ymca. The latter group, which serves 17 million children and families, and whose leadership is generally conservative, has gone out of its way to avoid the politics associated with the rally. "We hope not to be sidetracked by who is calling this event," says Y public-policy senior associate John Brooks. "Supporting kids shouldn't be a partisan issue."

Nor, in the final analysis, should it be limited to children in poverty or in crisis. "Any broad-based politics about family issues is going to have to engage parents as citizens and as actors, not simply as objects of attention," says Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who believes Edelman must inspire "the missing middle," the working parents stressed out by juggling work and family. One reason why children's issues are likely to become a prominent campaign issue is that both parties are working hard to attract blue-collar mothers. "Women are more likely to vote the family issues and want to be sure children get the right start," says Stanley Greenberg, pollster for the Democratic National Committee.

Politicians are not invited on Saturday, though. They would only obscure what Edelman, a veteran of many marches, sees as this event's main goal: to inspire the heady awareness--found in the civil rights campaigns and the antiwar movement--that individuals can change the world.

--Reported by Melissa Ludtke with Marian Wright Edelman, Ann Blackman and Ann M. Simmons/Washington, and Tammerlin Drummond/Miami

With reporting by MELISSA LUDTKE WITH MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, ANN BLACKMAN AND ANN M. SIMMONS/WASHINGTON, AND TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND/MIAMI