Posts Tagged ‘reviews’
Saturday, August 28th, 2010
Last week, Geoffrey Canada visited Cleveland, where he gave a speech at the Palace Theater to an audience of 1,400. The city is the site of the Cleveland Promise Neighborhood, an ambitious attempt to replicate the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone. (The local public radio station, WCPN, reported on the Cleveland initiative in June.) This week, inspired by Canada’s visit, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer reposted a review of Whatever It Takes. And in the Cleveland Leader, columnist Mansfield Frazier gave a glowing account of Canada’s speech, but confessed to feeling pessimistic about the chances for a Zone replication in Cleveland:
I’ve been dancing around this issue for a couple of months now, but, feeling empowered by Geoffrey Canada’s inspiring and brave speech, let me just give voice to my concern, just lay it on the table, as we attempt to move forward with his model here in Cleveland: We’ll figure out a way to do it wrong.
Left to our own devices and old ways of doing things, we’ll take a program that works well in Harlem and make a mess of it here in Cleveland … we’re experts at screwing things up. And then the power structure will be able to step back and say, “Oh well, we tried, but you know how hard it is to try to help those people.”
Tags: Geoffrey Canada, HCZ, newspapers, Ohio, Promise Neighborhoods, radio, reviews, speeches
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Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
Two new reviews of “Whatever It Takes,” one from a blog that promotes health in Harlem, the other from an education consultant, who calls the book “a perfect summer read for any educator.”
Tags: blogs, reviews
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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
In the Winter issue of the RSA Journal, published by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, in London, an article by James Forman, Jr., about Promise Neighborhoods, the Harlem Children’s Zone, and “Whatever It Takes.” Forman, a law professor at Georgetown and NYU, reviewed “Whatever It Takes” for the Boston Review last year. From the RSA Journal article:
HCZ occupies an unusual place on the ideological spectrum, one that allows it to appeal to both sides of divisive social policy debates. Consider one example. If poor people are to improve their lives, should they change their behaviours or should society do more for them? Instead of choosing a side, HCZ’s model says that the answer is both. Drawing on decades of research showing that certain middle-class parenting techniques prepare children to navigate school and the world, HCZ teaches those techniques to Harlem parents. At the same time, it recognises that parental skills are only part of the puzzle. After all, poor parents already know what to do when their child says: “My tooth hurts”; the American scandal is that many parents cannot afford to take their children to a dentist. In response, HCZ provides medical and dental care for families that need it.
Tags: HCZ, magazines, Promise Neighborhoods, reviews, universities
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Sunday, October 25th, 2009
The Springfield, Ohio, News-Sun has this article about my trip there this week:
Paul Tough, New York Times Magazine editor, will address the issues of poverty, education and the achievement gap, during a special presentation, 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 28 at Springfield High School. Sponsored in part by Wittenberg University’s Institute for Education Innovation, the event will include the results of Tough’s research into Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone project.
(There’s more information here about my upcoming talk.)
In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aisha Sultan devotes this week’s column to “Whatever It Takes” and the Harlem Children’s Zone.
And the Cleveland Plain-Dealer reviews (briefly) the paperback edition of “Whatever It Takes.”
Tags: Missouri, newspapers, Ohio, reviews, speeches, universities
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Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
This week’s issue of the Minneapolis City Pages has a preview of my reading and talk this Sunday at Magers and Quinn Booksellers:
The book tracks [Geoffrey] Canada’s own tale of escaping the ghetto and attending Harvard, but the real story is his willingness to try anything to change the prospects of Harlem’s kids. His greatest achievement turns out to be the Harlem Children’s Zone, an area of central Harlem where programs educate youth and their parents, as well as prepare kids to compete for education and work opportunities. Tough will discuss his book, which notes the simple things Canada has done (encouraging mothers to read to their kids at an early age) and the more epic accomplishments (opening a school, maintaining long-term success). It is one hell of a story.
Tags: bookstores, Minnesota, newspapers, readings, reviews
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Friday, October 2nd, 2009
“Whatever It Takes” is a staff pick at the Virginia Beach Public Library, and it got a nice review on the library’s VBPL Recommends blog:
Paul Tough capably chronicles some of the stories of those who serve and are served by the HCZ. In introducing the reader to parents, staff workers and children, he demonstrates that reality is as powerful as fiction. When we meet teen parents like Victor and Cheryl (and their baby Victor, Jr.) we discover gripping drama, nail-biting suspense, engaging warmth, and sobering tragedy as the family attends Baby College, HCZ’s enormously popular and carefully designed entrance program.
Good nonfiction provides a flexible read. Whatever It Takes delivers a rewarding experience, whether it is read as a biography of a present-day educational crusader, a treatise on the clash between traditional and charter school models for public education, a blueprint for effective early learning programs, or a touching account of human challenge and triumph in urban America.
Tags: blogs, librarians, reviews, Virginia
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Saturday, July 4th, 2009
- Geoffrey Canada visits the White House.
- Wicked Local Arlington does a stream-of-consciousness transcription of my talk (and a panel discussion) at the MassINC event in Boston.
- PostBourgie, an online “running, semi-orderly conversation about class and politics and media and gender and whatever else we can think of,” chooses Whatever It Takes as its Book of the Month.
- And a professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania reviews Whatever It Takes from the homeschooling perspective.
Tags: blogs, Boston, Geoffrey Canada, Obama, reviews
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Thursday, June 4th, 2009
In the Summer issue of Education Next, Cara Spitalewitz reviews Whatever It Takes:
Tough has been interviewing and observing Canada for five years, and his knowledge of the inner workings of Canada’s programs and the ideas driving them is striking. He provides overviews of the current research on early intervention as well as the evolution of poverty theory, from the controversy surrounding the 1965 Moynihan report to the debate between sociologist William Julius Wilson and political scientist Charles Murray about the root causes of poverty. …
Tough covers a great deal of ground, but what runs through all of his reporting is [Geoffrey] Canada’s staunch pragmatism. As competing education manifestos vie for policymakers’ allegiance, “which side are you on?” distressingly seems to be a more important question for many than “what works?” Canada, along with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is one of the few education leaders to have signed both manifestos. Who can focus on philosophical debates when we are losing children by the tens of thousands?
Tags: magazines, reviews
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Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
On 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.
Tags: blogs, Canada, reviews
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Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
From 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.
Tags: Boston, HCZ, KIPP, magazines, reviews
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