Soledad O’Brien reports for CNN on the Harlem Children’s Zone, including visits to Harlem Gems and Promise Academy, a clip from the Obama speech and cameos by Darryl Reeves and Darryl Reeves Jr., both of whom were featured in the Baby College chapter of Whatever It Takes.
Archive for May, 2009
CNN on Harlem Children’s Zone
Sunday, May 31st, 2009Geoffrey Canada in Minneapolis
Friday, May 29th, 2009On Wednesday, Geoffrey Canada spoke to a crowd of 1,000 in Minneapolis about his work in Harlem. MinnPost.com quoted Canada’s speech:
“This is the floor — not the ceiling — of what American kids should get,” Canada said. “Our concept is of a seamless web of supports around young people that goes with them throughout their developmental stages.
“What people mostly have done is create great early-childhood programs, and they don’t do anything after. Or a great after-school program for elementary schools and then they go to lousy middle schools and there’s nothing in the high schools. You’ve got to connect these supports so you can leverage one investment into the next investment. … It takes time. It’s not going to happen in a year or two.”
And Joe Nathan, the director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota, asks:
What drew a sustained standing ovation from more 1,000 Minnesotans last week? It was the remarkable efforts of Geoffrey Canada in the Harlem section of New York – and his skilled combination of research-based ideas for improving public education.
Canada has achieved considerable success in Harlem by using suggestions from both major philosophies about ways to significantly improve public education.
Forum in Chattanooga
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009On June 20, I’ll be talking about Whatever It Takes and the Harlem Children’s Zone at a forum in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on preparing children for early school success. Details here.
Charleston and Promise Neighborhoods
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009According to this morning’s Post and Courier, the schools superintendent in Charleston, S.C., is angling to make that city home to one of the first Promise Neighborhoods. According to the article:
The intention of the Promise Neighborhoods project is to replicate in communities nationwide some of what’s been done in the Harlem’s Children Zone, a 97-block area in Central Harlem in New York City that provides social, educational, health and recreational programs for children from birth through college. …
President Barack Obama began talking about Promise Neighborhoods during his campaign, and he’s requested $10 million in next year’s budget for one-year planning grants for communities that want to develop these programs. Grant recipients would be eligible to receive implementation money the following year. …
Communities can’t apply for the planning grant yet, but McGinley has been working behind-the-scenes to ensure that Charleston would be a frontrunner for the money. She’s talked with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey, and downtown and North Charleston ministers to gather support. She’s pulled research on poverty and school readiness and drafted a preliminary proposal that targets downtown, North Charleston and possibly Hollywood-area schools.
Child Welfare Conference in Maine
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009On June 18, I’ll be the keynote speaker at the 16th Annual Child Welfare Conference at the University of Maine, which is just outside Bangor. According to this press release, the conference
will examine a wide range of issues most affecting children today, including poverty, education, substance abuse, serious child injury and child exploitation. The conference, titled “Hot in Child Welfare,” is designed for professionals working with children, and is open to the public. It begins at 8 a.m. at the Wells Conference Center on the UMaine campus. Registration forms and information about fees can be obtained by calling 581-2398 or emailing: RArnold@maine.edu.
Maclean’s blog
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009On his blog at Macleans.ca, the website of Maclean’s, the Canadian weekly, Andrew Potter reviews “Whatever It Takes”:
Tough’s book is the distillation of four years of reporting he did on the HCZ, while working for the New York Times magazine. It traces the evolution of Canada’s efforts, narrating both the wonderful successes (such as the Baby College that teaches even the most inept and unprepared parents how to properly foster their child’s cognitive development) as well as the failures — the most heartbreaking of which is the summary expulsion of an underperforming class of eighth graders from his charter school, the Promise Academy. …
Harlem is one of the most complicated, fascinating, and exasperating neighborhoods in North America. Geoffrey Canada is a remarkable man, and Paul Tough has written a small masterpiece about him and his community.
Michelle Obama on Geoffrey Canada
Sunday, May 17th, 2009In her commencement address yesterday at the University of California in Merced, Michelle Obama praised the work of Geoffrey Canada:
[O]ne of my heroes, Geoffrey Canada, grew up in the South Bronx. After graduating from Bowdoin and getting his masters at Harvard, he returned to New York City and used his education to ensure that the next generation would have a chance at the same opportunity. Geoffrey’s Harlem Children’s Zone is a nationally recognized program that covers 100 blocks and reaches nearly 10,000 children with a variety of social services to ensure that all kids are prepared to get a good education.
And in an effort to invest in and encourage the future Wendy Kopps, Van Joneses and Geoffrey Canadas, the Obama administration recently launched the Office of Social Innovation at the White House. The President has asked Congress to provide $50 million in seed capital to fund great ideas like the ones I just described. The Office is going to identify the most promising, results-oriented non-profit programs and expand their reach throughout the country.
Seattle talk
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009On June 10, I’ll be the keynote speaker at the annual United Way of King County breakfast at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle. Copies of Whatever It Takes will be for sale, thanks to the Elliott Bay Book Company.
Boston Review review
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009From the May/June issue of the Boston Review, a long and thoughtful review by James Forman Jr. of “Whatever It Takes” and Jay Mathews’s book on KIPP, “Work Hard. Be Nice.”
My favorite section was on something that doesn’t get mentioned much in either book: segregation.
It says something important that the schools offered up as our best hopes are so completely segregated. It says even more that neither Tough nor Mathews feels the need to address the question of segregation in their books.
It is a tragedy that we have taken integration off the table. Perhaps I believe this because my parents—one black, one white—met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and saw themselves as part of a struggle for an integrated, beloved community. Perhaps it is because I am still moved by Thurgood Marshall’s argument that our nation will only learn to live together when our children learn together. Or maybe it is because of my lingering fear that if poor kids are isolated in schools of their own, they will inevitably end up being shortchanged by a society content with massive wealth inequality. If we make schools better and improve the lives of some kids (or, in Canada’s case, a whole neighborhood) but do nothing to disrupt segregation, are we simply making separate a little more equal?
Despite these misgivings, I think I know how Canada, Feinberg, and Levin would defend their choice. I know it because, when I saw the terrible schools for jailed kids in D.C., I felt an obligation to help create a better alternative, even though I knew that almost every child in the school would be African-American and that most would be poor. I recognized the urgency of offering those kids the support and resources that no other program was going to provide. But I do not want to live in a society that accepts this situation as inevitable. And I am confident that Canada, Feinberg, and Levin do not, either.
David Brooks on HCZ
Thursday, May 7th, 2009In Friday’s New York Times, an op-ed column by David Brooks on the Harlem Children’s Zone and on a new study of the Zone by Harvard economist Roland Fryer:
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.
They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. …
To understand the culture in these schools, I’d recommend “Whatever It Takes,” a gripping account of Harlem Children’s Zone by my Times colleague Paul Tough, and “Sweating the Small Stuff,” a superb survey of these sorts of schools by David Whitman.