Naomi Thiers reviews “Whatever It Takes” in the February issue of Educational Leadership magazine:
Drawing on the five years he spent chronicling the Harlem Children’s Zone, founded by a man named Geoffrey Canada, journalist Paul Tough gives a fascinating and ultimately upbeat description of the “outsized and audacious new endeavor” that Canada designed for a 24-block zone of Harlem.
In a new interview in Chicago magazine, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of education, takes a stand for replicating the Harlem Children’s Zone:
Q: Have you read Whatever It Takes, the new book about Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone? I bring it up because that project, which tries to catch kids from birth and guide them all the way to college, suggests that it may be necessary in certain communities for the neighborhood school to take on functions that lie traditionally in the realm of social services.
A: Geoff Canada’s a good, good friend of mine. I’m actually meeting with him Monday.Q: Obviously you’re familiar with what he’s doing.
A: Yes. I’m going to create 20 Harlem Children’s Zones around the country. I am.Q: Really? Do you think you’ll face opposition to the federal role expanding in that way?
A: I don’t care. I’m going to fund it.
I’ve got an article in the new issue of Mother Jones on Barack Obama’s poverty platform:
The bigger question is whether Obama, once in office, will conclude that the government can’t now afford this kind of bold initiative. It may be that the plan will be put on hold for a year or two, until the worst of the downturn passes. But Obama, drawing on the research of his Hyde Park neighbor, the economist James Heckman, has made the point that programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone are not giveaways; they’re investments that will pay for themselves in reduced spending on welfare, job training, and the criminal justice system. As Obama put it, “We will find the money to do this because we can’t afford not to.”
[Photo by Alex Tehrani]
Last September, the American Prospect published a review by David Kirp of “Whatever It Takes.” It’s now online. Kirp writes:
Can Canada make good on his guarantee that Promise Academy, and the additional academies on HCZ’s drawing boards, will rewrite the failure script for Harlem’s children? For starters, will it improve the lives of the 100 kindergarteners and 100 sixth-graders who enrolled in 2004? Tough, an editor at The New York Times Magazine, tells this story with the what-happens-next pacing of a good mystery and the richness of a fine ethnography, weaving together in lapidary prose the strands of a complex narrative.
Kay S. Hymowitz reviews “Whatever It Takes” for the City Journal.
Now online: a brief review of Whatever It Takes from the September issue of O, The Oprah Magazine:
Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes (Houghton Mifflin) brings you inside the Promise Academy and into the mind of a visionary who has known failure (his school continues to struggle), yet has the nerve to keep the future squarely in view.
Today on Edutopia.com, an online magazine, an interview I did with Bernice Yeung on the process of reporting and writing Whatever It Takes. I said things like:
The prekindergarten teachers were just so focused on and conscious of language, on how to get language into every part of the day to expand these kids’ vocabularies, which all this research shows is exactly what the students need the most at that stage.
Sara Eckel has an article today in Time Out New York about me and my book:
“In a lot of books about social programs, there is a tight focus on one great teacher, one great classroom, and then they all go on to a chess championship. But you don’t see how that fits into a bigger picture,” says Tough, who says he was inspired by Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy and Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, books in which reporters spent a year or more following people who were trying to solve a complicated problem, while also providing a larger context for the issue itself. “I wanted to write a book that would follow a real narrative—with characters and ups and downs—but that would also answer some of these big questions about poverty.”