April 10th, 2010
From Early Ed Watch, the early-education-policy blog run by the New America Foundation, an interesting analysis of the Obama Administration’s Promise Neighborhood initiative:
Though the FY11 budget request specifies that Promise Neighborhoods should serve kids from birth to college, it remains to be seen how much emphasis each Promise Neighborhood will put on early childhood programs, such as those like Baby College and Harlem Gems. If and when Promise Neighborhoods are eventually built, we will be keeping a close eye on whether early childhood maintains its central role in this “birth to 18” pipeline.
Tags: blogs, Obama, Promise Neighborhoods
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April 4th, 2010
From the Chicago Defender, news of an ambitious effort to bring Promise Neighborhood funding to the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood. The Woodlawn Children’s Promise Zone is a collaboration between Bishop Arthur Brazier [above] and Prof. Charles Payne and others at the University of Chicago. As the paper reports:
More than one year ago, the pastor emeritus of Apostolic Church of God, Bishop Arthur Brazier began working with schools in his area and quickly became concerned with how little the community was doing to improve the academic standards in the schools.
He learned about the Harlem Children’s Zone and paid a visit to the organization that focuses on the three academic levels of a child’s life — Baby College, Promise Academy and College Success Office – within a 96-square block area in Harlem, N.Y.
Brazier then drew from HCZ’s model and convened a coalition of community leaders, educators and parents to develop a plan to improve Woodlawn’s 10,000 children’s lives from birth through college years and beyond. The Woodlawn Children’s Promise Zone was born, he said.
Tags: Chicago, newspapers, Promise Neighborhoods
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April 4th, 2010
From the Providence Journal, an article about the Providence Children’s Initiative, a group that wants to bring a Promise Neighborhood to the city:
“Providence isn’t Harlem, but we are trying to adopt some of the components” of the larger program to address local needs, said [Family Service program director Swan] Capris. “For example, we’re working with the Providence School Department to implement the program, and we’re targeting neighborhoods where there is a high percentage of people living below the federal poverty level — not just minority students and their families. It’s for anyone who is in the selected neighborhood who is below the poverty level.”
Family Service started working on the initiative a year ago. A committee made up of nonprofit organizations, government agencies and other groups meets weekly, but officials have yet to target a neighborhood for help. “We’re still in the early planning stages,” Capris said.
Tags: newspapers, Promise Neighborhoods, Rhode Island
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April 4th, 2010
From the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., a story about efforts to bring a Promise Neighborhood to that city:
The Charleston Promise Neighborhood would include Charleston’s East Side and Neck Area and extend into North Charleston, and its goal is to make that area indistinguishable from the rest of the county by breaking the cycle of poverty and improving education. The roughly 3,000 children who live in the zone and attend Sanders-Clyde, James Simons, Mary Ford and Chicora elementary schools would be the primary beneficiaries of its services and programs, which would begin at birth.
Tags: newspapers, Promise Neighborhoods, South Carolina
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April 4th, 2010
Recent blog posts on “Whatever It Takes” from a reference librarian in Perrysburg, Ohio; a student at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock; a Microsoft executive in Seattle; and an early-childhood specialist in Chicago, who posted her reflections on the panel discussion I was a part of at Loyola University Law School in February:
I also think that there are many, many people in non-profits who are tired of business-as-usual, tired of feeling like their work is a drop in the ocean, tired of talking themselves into believing in what they do every day. Some of those people must have been in the audience that night, looking for a thicker strand of hope to pull on.
From what I’ve read, hope is much of what Geoffrey Canada’s concept is riding on now: hope with an almost desperate promise of metrics, if we could all be patient for a while. And many of us are willing to be patient, because we believe as we have believed for years, that he’s making it happen – he’s doing it. He’s doing what we thought should be done all along: comprehensive services, for all stages of childhood, supportive of the family and community as well as the child. This is the silent promise we’ve been imagining, and Canada actually managed to speak the promise out loud.
Tags: Arkansas, blogs, Chicago, Ohio, panels, Seattle, universities
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April 4th, 2010
In Charlotte, N.C., last month, Geoffrey Canada spoke to “hundreds of Charlotte leaders,” according to a story in the Charlotte Observer, including “educators, agency heads and civic leaders [who] have been talking about whether Charlotte could follow” the Harlem Children’s Zone model.
And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, according to a story in the Tulsa World, Canada visited schools and spoke to a symposium on education about many topics, including the prospects for something like a Zone in Tulsa:
“There are a lot of reasons for the city of Tulsa to be excited about the future. A lot of fundamentals exist in very high-quality levels here in Tulsa,” Canada said. “There has to be a clear plan drawn up about where we go from here.”
Tags: Geoffrey Canada, newspapers, North Carolina, Oklahoma, photographs, speeches
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April 4th, 2010
From two very different publications, articles about the Harlem Children’s Zone and the prospect of Promise Neighborhoods. In Real Change News, a weekly paper sold by the homeless in Seattle, an interview with Geoffrey Canada, in which he recounts the advice he has given the Obama Administration about Promise Neighborhoods:
We felt like they had to go with the right leadership. They had to get communities that were already down the road on figuring out their area and working out the collaboration issues. There had to be some structure for management in place, and there had to be resources so that it wouldn’t be under resourced, and a real commitment of local leadership — for the vision of the community and not for the individual schools. We thought those were some of the must-haves in the first few of these that have come up. So we’ve had those kinds of conversations with the administration.
And in Forbes, Nicole Perlroth cautions:
Any school rescue program that relies less on donations and more on taxpayer money is at risk of becoming a captive of the education establishment. A two-year project to replicate the Zone in Jacksonville, Fla. saw its largest private donor, the Chartrand Foundation, back out when it appeared that the program would be run by government officials and lack the Zone’s accountability.
Tags: Geoffrey Canada, HCZ, interviews, magazines, newspapers, Obama, Promise Neighborhoods, Seattle
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March 4th, 2010
From the Loyola Law School web site, a report on last week’s event:
The forum, which included a keynote address by author and former New York Times magazine editor Paul Tough (pictured left), explored the The Harlem Children’s Zone approach to inner city education, as well as addressed the recent plans by the Obama administration to offer new funding to replicate twenty “Promise Neighborhoods” throughout the country. …
Tough and the panel of Chicago experts discussed the potential impact of a Promise Neighborhood in Chicago, how to improve on the HCZ model, as well as addressed issues that distinguish Chicago from Harlem and other communities seeking to create a “Children’s Zone.” Expert panelists included Loyola law alumnus Azim Ramelize, Chicago Dept. of Children and Youth Services; Chris Brown, Local Initiatives Support Corporation; Dr. Bradley Stolbach, La Rabida Children’s Hospital; and Barbara Bowman, Chief Officer, Early Education, Chicago Public Schools.
Tags: Chicago, HCZ, panels, photographs, Promise Neighborhoods, speeches, universities
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March 2nd, 2010
Rob Wildeboer, a criminal-justice reporter for WBEZ radio in Chicago, hosted the panel discussion that followed my speech at Loyola University Law School last week. Before the event, Rob and I sat down in the WBEZ studio for an interview about the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Neighborhoods. The interview aired on Friday as part of the local “All Things Considered” broadcast. Here’s the audio.
Tags: Chicago, HCZ, interviews, Promise Neighborhoods, radio
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March 2nd, 2010
The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education has selected “Whatever It Takes” for its quarterly book club. I’ll be taking part in a “web conference” to discuss the book online on March 24 at noon Eastern time.
Tags: book clubs, websites
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