Paul Tough: Whatever It Takes

In the Spring issue of the Wilson Quarterly, Tom Toch reviews “Work Hard. Be Nice.,” “Sweating the Small Stuff” and “Whatever It Takes”:

Paul Tough argues compellingly in Whatever It Takes that new school models cannot by themselves transform urban education. A writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine, Tough tells the story of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit agency working with 7,000 kids in 97 square blocks of central Harlem. To Geoffrey Canada, a product of the South Bronx who escaped to Long Island and then to Bowdoin College in Maine before founding the organization, “it wasn’t enough to help out in just one part of a child’s life: [Harlem’s Children’s Zone] would need to combine education, social, and medical services.”

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.

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.