This week, the education department announced the 21 recipients of Promise Neighborhood planning grants, from the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem to Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission in Los Angeles. The department’s press release lists the other 19 winners, and more details are here. There was a good AP overview, and a story on the New York angle in the Times.
If the group doesn’t receive federal funds to implement the plan, Whatever it Takes volunteers will continue to seek donations of time or cash from foundations, individuals and other service agencies both near and far, according to Lewis Earnest, chairman of the board for Family Connection/Communities in Schools of Athens.
“We’ve got some investment capital and we believe that we can show other people, other foundations and individuals and state and local government that we’ve got a good plan,” Earnest said.
In today’s New York Times, an op-ed I wrote about the debate over funding for President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative:
So, at this moment of uncertainty and experimentation, should the federal government wait, as critics of Promise Neighborhoods suggest, until ironclad evidence for one big solution exists?
Or should it create a competitive research-and-development marketplace to make bets on innovations, the way the government did during the space race and in the early days of the Internet, and allow the most successful strategies to rise to the top?
I left my editor’s job at the New York Times last week in order to write full-time and start working on a new book. The New York Observer wrote about my departure here and here, Alexander Russo mentioned it here, and there was some additional blog coverage here and here.
In 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.
When it comes to an introduction to the debate about poverty and parenting in urban America, you could hardly do better than Tough’s book. The children of the uneducated and impoverished too often bear a gloomy inheritance, their futures set in stone from an early age. Within Canada’s 97 blocks, Tough finds a different kind of legacy — one shaped by parents who have learned to pay attention to their children’s developmental needs. With a support network unlike anything else in America, the children of Harlem can envision a future so many others expect as a matter of course.
This weekend, Whatever It Takes hit No. 34 on the New York Times Book Review’s hardcover nonfiction bestseller list. You didn’t know the list went that high, did you?
Here’s video of the speech I mentioned in today’s Times Magazine article, the speech in which Barack Obama explains his plans to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country. The full text of Obama’s address is here.