Children's Defense Fund Researcher Paul V. Smith

Paul V. Smith, 69, who died of sepsis Sept. 9 at Holy Cross Hospital, for more than 30 years combed through federal data on behalf of children and the poor as the director of research for the Children's Defense Fund.

"No one -- and I mean no one -- has done more to move the nation towards justice for children and the poor than Paul Smith," Marian Wright Edelman, Children's Defense Fund founder, said in remarks upon his retirement late last year.

Dr. Smith, she said, was a "crucial midwife" at the birth of the organization, designing the survey for the group's first study, "Children Out of School in America," in 1974. The findings of the survey led to the enactment of what is now called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.

He put numbers in "a moral context," Edelman said, such as when he contrasted Defense Department spending for vaccinations for the pets of the military with the Reagan administration's ultimately unsuccessful proposal to cut the budget for vaccinations for children.

But it was his analysis of complex data and his computer programming skills that helped the organization make its mark.

Working out of the group's basement, where one reporter noted that "facts" were piled so deep they seem likely to bury him, Dr. Smith was periodically quoted in the press, providing the statistical and analytic underpinning for many articles about social service policies and occasionally commenting upon the findings.

He fought against the tendency of the innumerate to mix up correlation and causation, although he was more forgiving than many statisticians.

"You and I don't have a statistical facility in our brains," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. "We are primates evolved to gather fruit in the forest and when possible to reproduce. But we have to exercise almost intolerable discipline to not jump to conclusions. There might be a banana behind that leaf, or it might be the tiger's tail. The one who makes the discrimination best and moves fastest either gets the banana or gets away from the tiger.

"So this leaping to conclusions is a good strategy given that the choices are simple and nothing complicated is going on. But at the level of major social policy choices, [jumping to conclusions] is a serious concern."

Born in Elmira, N.Y., on Dec. 3, 1938, Paul Vines Smith graduated from Harvard College in 1961. He served in the National Guard for five years and worked for Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. in Boston.

While studying for his doctorate in the sociology of education at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, which he received in 1977, he began working with Edelman at Harvard University's Center for Law and Education on the precursor to the Children's Defense Fund.

When the organization moved to Washington, so did Dr. Smith and his family, in 1977. He lived in the same house in Silver Spring since then.

An omnivorous reader, he also contributed the research to most of Edelman's books.

Survivors include his wife of 45 years, Judith Smith of Silver Spring; two children, Margaret Smith of Gaithersburg and Matthew Smith of Silver Spring.