Interesting piece in today's New York Times Magazine. It's something that will interest both of us. My apologies if someone has already posted it.
June 20, 2004
The Harlem Project
By PAUL TOUGH
Part 1
nytimes.com
Back in 1990, Geoffrey Canada was just your average do-gooder. That year, he became the president of a nonprofit charitable organization based in Harlem called the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, and he set out trying to improve the world, one poor child at a time. It was a bad moment to be poor in New York City. Harlem, especially, was suffering under the simultaneous plagues of crack cocaine, cheap guns and rampant homelessness, and Canada's main goal at Rheedlen, in those years, was to keep the children in his programs alive. The organization had an annual budget of $3 million, which it spent on a predictable array of services in Upper Manhattan: after-school programs, truancy prevention, anti-violence training for teenagers. The programs seemed to do a lot of good for the children who were enrolled in them, at least in part because of Canada's own level of devotion. He was obsessed with his job, personally invested in the lives of the children he was helping and devastated when they ended up in prison or on drugs or shot dead on the street.
But after he ran these programs for a few years, day in and day out, his ideas about poverty started to change. The catalyst was surprisingly simple: a waiting list. One Rheedlen after-school program had more children who wanted to enroll than it was able to admit. So Canada chose the obvious remedy: he drew up a waiting list, and it quickly filled with the names of children who needed his help and couldn't get it. That bothered him, and it kept bothering him, and before long it had him thinking differently about his entire organization. Sure, the 500 children who were lucky enough to be participating in one of his programs were getting help, but why those 500 and not the 500 on the waiting list? Or why not another 500 altogether? For that matter, why 500 and not 5,000? If all he was doing was picking some kids to save and letting the rest fail, what was the point?
At around the same time, he was invited by Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children's Defense Fund, to join a group she had recently founded called the Black Community Crusade for Children. Once a year, she brought together two dozen leaders from across the country who were trying to solve the problems of poor black children. They met down at a farm in Tennessee that had once been owned by Alex Haley, the author of ''Roots,'' and they spent a few days comparing notes on the crisis in America's poor neighborhoods. For Canada, the good news at these discussions was that he wasn't alone -- but that was the bad news, too. All across the country, in big cities and in small towns, well-meaning nonprofits were finding the same thing: they were helping a few kids, getting them out of the ghettos and off the streets and sometimes even into college, but for the masses of poor children, and especially those who were black, nothing was changing; those children were still falling behind in school, scoring below average on reading tests and staying poor.
Most of the men and women who were meeting in Tennessee were from Canada's generation -- he is 52 -- and they had come of age in the hopeful period following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, when things seemed as if they were about to improve for poor black Americans. But as Edelman convened her group, life in the ghettos was getting worse, not better. To Canada, it felt as if he and his peers were losing more children more quickly than they had ever lost before. For the first time, he felt a sense of hopelessness, and he found himself thinking that the kids he was seeing in kindergarten in Harlem were already doomed, destined to spend the rest of their lives stuck at the bottom.
Canada knew there were success stories out there. There were always reports in the newspapers about ''special'' kids who ''overcame the odds.'' Some brilliant teacher or charity or millionaire went into the ghetto and found 100 kids and educated them and turned their lives around. But those stories seemed counterproductive to Canada. Instead of helping some kids beat the odds, he thought, why don't we just change the odds? When he looked around, though, he couldn't find anyone who knew how to do that. Experts in his field had figured out how to educate one disadvantaged child, or one classroom full of kids, but the benefits were localized, and usually temporary. And no one had any idea how to change a whole school system or a whole housing project, or for that matter a whole neighborhood. So, in the middle of the 1990's, that's what Geoffrey Canada decided he would do. And now, 10 years later, he has become a very different kind of do-gooder, one with a mission both radically ambitious and startlingly simple. He wants to prove that poor children, and especially poor black children, can succeed -- that is, achieve good reading scores, good grades and good graduation rates -- and not just the smartest or the most motivated or the ones with the most attentive parents, but all of them, in big numbers. Three years ago, he chose as his laboratory a 24-block zone of central Harlem, now expanded to 60 blocks -- an area with about 6,500 children, more than 60 percent of whom live below the poverty line and three-quarters of whom score below grade level on statewide reading and math tests -- and he named it the Harlem Children's Zone.
After welfare reform passed in 1996, the national debate on poverty seemed simply to shut down. Most conservatives explain poverty by looking to culture and behavior: bad parenting, high out-of-wedlock birth rates, teenagers who don't know the value of an honest day's work. To most liberals, the real problems are economic: underfinanced public schools and a dearth of well-paying semiskilled jobs, which make it nearly impossible for families to pull themselves out of poverty. Canada says he believes that both assumptions are true. He agrees that the economy is stacked against poor people no matter how hard they work, but he also thinks that poor parents aren't doing a good enough job of rearing their children. What makes Canada's project unique is that it addresses both problems at once. He keeps the liberals happy by pouring money into schools and day-care centers and after-school programs, and he satisfies the conservatives by directly taking on the problems of inadequate parenting and the cultural disadvantages of a ghetto home life. It's not just that he's trying to work both sides of the ideological street. It's that Canada has concluded that neither approach has a chance of working alone. Fix the schools without fixing the families and the community, and children will fail; but they will also fail if you improve the surrounding community without fixing the schools.
Canada's new program combines educational, social and medical services. It starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an entire neighborhood. It operates on the principle that each child will do better if all the children around him are doing better. So instead of waiting for residents to find out about the services on their own, the organization's recruiters go door-to-door to find participants, sometimes offering prizes and raffles and free groceries to parents who enroll their children in the group's programs. What results is a remarkable level of ''market penetration,'' as the organization describes it. Eighty-eight percent of the roughly 3,400 children under 18 in the 24-block core neighborhood are already served by at least one program, and this year Canada began to extend his programs to the larger 60-block zone. The objective is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can't slip through.
At a moment when each new attempt to solve the problem of poverty seems to fall apart, one after the next, what is going on in central Harlem is one of the biggest social experiments of our time. Social scientists and poverty advocates are watching carefully to see if Canada can pull it off. Many are skeptical; they have seen too many ambitious anti-poverty programs collapse because of budget overruns or administrative hubris, and Canada acknowledges that his work has just begun. But the sheer scale of Canada's project has created a palpable excitement among foundation officials, poverty scholars and business leaders. Marian Wright Edelman said that though there are a few other good neighborhood-based programs around the country, ''none are as comprehensive as the Harlem Children's Zone, and none of them hold as much promise.''
David Saltzman, executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation, concurred: ''If it works, it'll be the best thing that's happened in a long time. Man, if Geoff can make this thing work, it's huge.''
The programs that the Harlem Children's Zone offers all seem carefully planned and well run, but none of them, on their own, are particularly revolutionary. It is only when they are considered together, as a network, that they seem so new. The organization employs more than 650 people in more than 20 programs; on a recent afternoon, I spent some time walking around Harlem, dropping in on one program after another. At Harlem Gems, a program for 40 prekindergarten students at a public school on 118th Street, Keith, who had just turned 5 and was missing a front tooth, sat at a computer working away at ''Hooked on Phonics,'' while Luis, a 19-year-old tutor, gave him one-on-one instruction. A few blocks up Lenox Avenue, at the Employment and Technology Center, 30 teenagers in T-shirts and basketball jerseys, all part of the organization's new investment club, were gathered around a conference table, listening to an executive from Lehman Brothers explain the difference between the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq. At P.S. 76 on West 121st Street, fifth-grade students in an after-school program were standing in front of their peers, reading aloud the autobiographies they had written that afternoon. And over at Truce, the after-school center for teenagers, a tutor named Carl was helping Trevis, a student in the eighth grade, with a research project for his social studies class, an eight-page paper on the life of Frederick Douglass. In a nearby housing project, a counselor from the Family Support Center was paying a home visit to a woman who had just been granted legal custody of her two grandchildren; in other apartments in the neighborhood, outreach workers from Baby College, a class for new parents, were making home visits of their own, helping teach better parenting techniques. A few blocks away, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 125th Street, construction was under way on the organization's new headquarters, a six-story, $44 million building that will also house the Promise Academy, a new charter school that Canada is opening in the fall.
While the new building is going up, Canada works on Park Avenue between 130th Street and 131st Street, in a small office in a six-story building that always seems to be under renovation. When I visited him on an icy afternoon in February, the radiator in his office was hissing constantly; when the room got too hot, Canada propped his window open with a book about community revitalization. That cooled things off, but it also created a new distraction. Directly outside Canada's second-floor window, no more than 20 feet away, are the elevated tracks that carry every Metro-North train heading out of Grand Central Terminal toward Connecticut and Westchester County. Each time a train passed, full of commuters on their way back to the suburbs, a rumbling filled the room, and Canada leaned a little closer so that I could make out what he was saying.
He is a tall, lean, athletic man with rounded shoulders and long limbs, and on this afternoon he was wearing a dark suit and a light blue shirt with his monogram sewn over the breast pocket. His graying hair was cropped close to his scalp. His office is spare -- a desk with a phone and a computer and a few piles of mail. There's a coat rack for his suit jacket, a bookshelf and a small round table with four chairs where he holds meetings. On his desk is a big picture of his 5-year-old son, Geoffrey Jr., from his second marriage. On the wall behind his desk are photographs -- Canada with President Clinton, Canada with Mayor Bloomberg -- as well as a portrait of a dozen or so of the young people he has trained in tae kwon do, which he has been teaching two nights a week for 21 years. A framed citation on the opposite wall certifies him as a third-degree black belt.
Although Canada likes to say that he is sick of against-the-odds success stories, he is one himself. He grew up on Union Avenue in the South Bronx. His father left when he was 4, and his mother reared him and his three brothers herself, sometimes supporting them with wages from menial jobs and sometimes relying on welfare and food from local charities. In his memoir ''Fist Stick Knife Gun,'' Canada describes the rituals and codes of violence that governed life for children like him, growing up in the inner city in the 50's and 60's. As a teenager, he drank and fought and smoked pot and carried a knife, but he also stayed in school, worked in a factory in the evenings and won a scholarship to Bowdoin College in Maine, and from there went on to earn a degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Bowdoin doesn't have many black alumni, and so when a promising black high-school senior is applying to the college from New York, the admissions office often sends the student to Canada for an alumni interview. When I arrived at his office, Canada was firing questions at Julian, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn who attends a magnet school. Canada made notes on a clipboard as Julian talked, answered a few of his questions about Bowdoin and Maine and then shook his hand and showed him out.
''He's a good kid, and I think he'll be terrific at Bowdoin,'' Canada said as he sat back down. ''But he's not my kid.'' Not a Harlem Children's Zone kid, he meant. ''He comes from a family, they've got it together, his parents are both educators. That's not us. We want those other kids, the ones who don't have two parents, whose parents haven't gone to college, who haven't got a chance statistically of making it.''
This distinction -- between children who are ''his kids'' and children who aren't -- is one that Canada draws all the time, and it goes back a long way in his own personal history. In ''Fist Stick Knife Gun,'' published in 1995, he describes a summer night when he was 14. He and half a dozen friends were sitting on someone's stoop drinking Rheingold when a car came screeching up and a man they didn't know got out and challenged one of them to a fight. The fight started, and at first it went according to the rules of Union Avenue, meaning no weapons and no one else gets involved. But then the stranger pulled out a gun, which was almost unheard of in 1966. Canada was ready to run, but instead he and his friends slowly converged on the older, bigger, better-armed man and scared him off the block through the strength of their numbers. What he learned that day, he wrote, was that he and his friends ''loved one another enough to be willing to die.''
When Canada talks about ''my kids'' now, he means the 6,500 children who live in the Harlem Children's Zone. But even more than that, he means the least successful children in the neighborhood. When he talks about them, it feels personal, as if his real objective is to work with children just like the cold, tough, frustrated boys he grew up with on Union Avenue, most of whom are now dead or in prison -- to make amends for the past by saving Harlem's children today.
Still, Canada's approach to poverty is not sentimental. When he considers any given poor family living in the Harlem Children's Zone, he divides their problems up in his mind into the ones he needs to solve and the ones he doesn't need to solve. The ones he needs to solve are the ones that are keeping the child from succeeding in school. Everything else, he has decided, he can leave alone. ''Do we think that it would be better for our parents to be married?'' he said, tilting back in his chair. ''Absolutely. Why? Because two-parent families have more income. Children tend to do better when they have two parents in the house.'' In fact, he knows that the great majority of births in Harlem are to single mothers and that most of the parents whose children he serves are unmarried. ''But what ability do we have to make an impact on that?'' he asked. ''None. Right? If we tried to do that, we'd spend all our time just doing that.''
Canada admitted that he is engaged in a kind of triage. He described for me an imaginary Harlem parent. ''You can be 20 years old, with a job that doesn't pay you enough money to survive on,'' he said. ''You're underemployed. You've got a kid. The kid's not doing well in school. You've got no place for the kid to be after school. Well, we'll provide services for that child. But we're not going to solve the problem of you being underemployed. That's not going to go away.''
He is, in other words, sidestepping the macroeconomic solutions that some advocates insist are the only way to solve the problem of poverty -- better wages, a national jobs program, a bigger earned-income tax credit -- in favor of programs that in one way or another directly affect the performance of the neighborhood's poor children.
Canada's educational philosophy emphasizes accountability and testing, and in that way it is similar to the dominant idea in public education today. The doctrine of accountability -- the idea that if students do poorly on standardized tests, schools should lose their financing and teachers should lose their jobs -- first emerged in the late 80's and early 90's in the Houston public schools. It then moved to the White House as the basis of the No Child Left Behind law when Rod Paige, the superintendent of the Houston schools, became the education secretary under George W. Bush. In the past year, though, news reports and lawsuits have revealed that when schools are compelled to meet certain numbers -- graduation rates, standardized-test scores -- their administrators often succumb to the urge to cheat. In Houston and New York, principals have shoved troubled students out of school, often under an administrative sleight of hand, in order to keep their schools' numbers artificially high. Canada has set the same rigorous goals for his own organization, but for him, the urge is the opposite: not to push the worst kids aside, but to recruit them even harder.
On this afternoon, Canada was worried about a set of internal statistics he had just uncovered: some of his students seemed to be doing too well. Last fall, his organization started a new program in four Harlem public schools called the Fifth Grade Institute, an after-school program for 160 fifth-grade students designed to begin catching them up to grade level before the charter school opens in September. Canada wanted to calculate how much the program was improving the reading ability of these students, so he asked to see their scores on the previous year's citywide fourth-grade reading test for comparison. Reading scores in New York City public schools are delivered in four categories, the higher the better. A 4 means the child is reading above grade level; a 3 means the child is reading at grade level; a 2 means below grade level; and a 1 means significantly below grade level. In most of the city, 2's and 3's predominate, with some 4's thrown in. In schools in Harlem, though, about three-quarters of the students score either a 1 or a 2; there are a few 3's, and 4's are rare.
But when Canada looked at the scores for the children in the Fifth Grade Institute, he found a lot of 3's -- more than a random sampling of Harlem students would have drawn. And on the day I visited, he was worried that the process of recruiting students for the Fifth Grade Institute had somehow been selective. He was sure it wasn't conscious on the part of his administrators, and, in fact, when he later received more detailed scores, they seemed more in line with the neighborhood patterns. Still, it was only natural, he knew, that parents who would bother to sign their children up for an ambitious after-school program would tend to be the better-organized, better-educated ones, and so it wouldn't be surprising if their children were better readers. Maybe his kids, the 1's and 2's, hadn't heard about the program, or maybe their parents hadn't managed to get it together in time to sign them up. |
