June 20, 2004
The Harlem Project
By PAUL TOUGH
Part 2
So what do you do? If you offer a new program, the best students will naturally enroll first, but you want the worst students. How do you get those parents to apply? Sometimes, in Canada's experience, it happens by accident. In 2001, the first year the Harlem Children's Zone offered Harlem Gems, its Head Start-like program for 4-year-olds, the organizers were behind schedule and didn't manage to send out fliers and start recruiting until August, just a few weeks before the program began. All the well-organized parents had already made their child-care plans for the year, and the last-minute, overburdened parents were the ones who signed up. That gave Canada the demographic he wanted, and he was able to get concrete results. When the 4-year-olds started Harlem Gems in 2001, 53 percent were scoring ''delayed'' or ''very delayed'' on the Bracken Basic Concept Scale for school readiness. At the end of the yearlong program, 26 percent were delayed.
In that case, the search for the most delayed kids worked because the organizers got lucky. Usually, though, it involves a lot of knocking on doors. I went out one morning with two outreach workers, Francesca Silfa and Mark Frazier, as they searched through central Harlem for new parents to enroll in Baby College. They knocked on the door of every apartment in a 21-story building on 118th Street, looking for parents with children under 4, leaving fliers under the doors if no one answered. They didn't meet with any resistance or hostility, although they did get a few skeptical looks. Mostly the process seemed slow and painstaking. Whenever they ran into Baby College graduates in the halls, they stopped to chat, prodding them for suggestions of good candidates in the building or elsewhere on the block. In addition to the door-to-door approach, recruiters visit laundromats, supermarkets and check-cashing outlets to look for new mothers. On the day I was with them, Silfa approached one woman pushing a stroller down 118th Street and managed to sign her and her daughter up on the spot.
For most parents, the attractions of a program like Baby College are obvious: useful information, the relief of spending Saturday morning getting to know other mothers instead of being stuck in a cramped apartment and free child care during class time. But if those aren't enough of a pull, there are raffles at the end of each class for $50 Old Navy gift certificates and a big drawing at the end of the course in which one parent wins a month's rent.
This combination of door-knocking, cajoling and offering incentives seems to work, and each nine-week session of Baby College draws a class of more than 100 parents, all of whom receive weekly follow-up visits at home. More than 95 percent of the parents -- 677 so far -- have successfully completed the course. The real test of this approach, Canada said when we spoke in February, will come when the Promise Academy opens its doors. By law, the charter school will be open to students from anywhere in the city's five boroughs, which means a lottery to choose the incoming classes from a broader pool of applicants. But the only students Canada really wants in his school are the ones from central Harlem, and especially the lowest-performing ones, exactly those whose parents, he said, are least inclined to apply to send their children to a special school.
''I will make sure that every single poor-performing school and parent in Harlem knows about this program,'' Canada said back in February. ''And if we don't get more 1's and 2's than 3's, then we haven't done our job properly.'' What that will require, Canada said, is persistent recruiting. ''We're going to have to go and force some of these parents to come and fill out the application,'' he said. Even once he finds the 1's and 2's, he added, ''their parents may say no, which means we have to go back and figure out a way to bribe them and get them to say yes. And I hate to put it like that, but that's what we'll end up doing. We'll end up saying, 'If you get your kid to apply, you'll get free movie passes.'''
The point of all of this intensive recruiting is to amass evidence -- indisputable data that show exactly what it will take to level the playing field and get poor children performing on the same level as the city's middle-class children. ''If we just end up saving a bunch of kids in Harlem, that will be good for them, but it won't mean an awful lot to me in the long run,'' Canada said. ''We want to be able to say that thousands of poor children can learn at high levels and perform at rates that are the same as middle-class children if they are given the opportunity to do so. But I want to be clear when I say we've got an answer that we really have an answer.''
The answer that Canada wants to provide is in fact very much in demand. There are plenty of examples of programs that didn't work: in 2000, for example, the Heinz Endowments abandoned as a failure a $59 million, five-year program to provide early-childhood care and education for 7,600 low-income children in and around Pittsburgh. The program's costs soared, and four years in, when Heinz pulled the plug, only 680 children were being served. What is most startling about the current study of poverty is how little conclusive evidence there is about which cures do work. There are no more than a dozen studies in the field that track how successful various interventions are over the long term, and the evidence from those studies tends to be spotty and subject to debate.
To William Julius Wilson, the Harvard sociologist who is one of the country's leading thinkers on urban poverty, this is precisely the significance of the Harlem Children's Zone. ''It is very, very important for policy makers to be able to cite examples of how you can improve the life chances of disadvantaged kids,'' he said. ''There are so many people who feel that whatever you do, it's not going to work. They want to say, 'Well, there's just a culture of poverty out there, and you can't really change it.''' If Canada's project is successful, though, Wilson said, it will ''provide the ammunition to policy makers who want to do something to address the problems of poverty.'' It will allow them to say: ''Here are kids who would ordinarily end up as permanent economic proletarians, and here is a program that has been able to overcome the cumulative disadvantages of chronic subordination. So why not commit ourselves across the nation to try to duplicate what he's done?''
Canada has a vivid picture in his mind of a judgment day to come -- 8, 10, 12 years down the road. Children who are now entering the system as infants will be taking their third-grade citywide math and reading tests, and they'll be scoring at or above grade level. Children who entered the system as Harlem Gems will be graduating from high school -- he expects that 90 percent of his students will graduate on time. It is only at that point, he explained, that he will be able to say to the rest of the country: ''This isn't an abstract conversation anymore. If you want poor children to do as well as middle-class children'' -- not necessarily to be superachievers but to become what he calls ''typical Americans,'' able to compete for jobs -- ''we now know how to do it.'' If he's right, the services he will provide will cost about $1,400 a year per student, on top of existing public-school funds. The country will finally know, he said, what the real price tag is for poor children to succeed.
Canada first came up with the idea for the Harlem Children's Zone in the mid-90's, but it wasn't until a few years later that he was ready to propose it officially to the board of the Rheedlen Centers (as the organization was then known). Crime had dropped sharply in Harlem, as it had everywhere in New York City, and Canada was no longer overwhelmed by the daily anxiety of trying to prevent the children in his programs from being killed. The national economy was booming, housing prices in the neighborhood were climbing and the first signs of gentrification were appearing, but for children in Harlem, the situation hadn't improved much. The unemployment rate there was still very high. (Even now, after the arrival of new middle-class residents, it stands at 18.5 percent.) It was in this context that Canada went before the Rheedlen board in 1998 and said that he wanted to remake the organization completely, to set up a kind of project that had never been tried before.
Canada had recently brought on a new board member, a fellow Bowdoin alumnus named Stan Druckenmiller, who, while running George Soros's Quantum Fund, became one of the most successful hedge-fund managers in the history of the stock market, amassing a personal fortune estimated at more than $1 billion. After Canada laid out his proposal to the board, Druckenmiller took him aside and told him that in his opinion he had the right plan but the wrong board. Canada agreed, and the two men politely deposed the chairman and replaced him with Druckenmiller, who set about raising money and recruiting new board members from the higher echelons of Wall Street.
The organization now has a lot more money than it did a few years ago. Druckenmiller paid for about a third of the cost of the new headquarters himself, and board members contribute about a third of the annual operating budget. (The rest comes from foundations, the government and private donors.) In April, the organization held a glittering fund-raising dinner at Cipriani 42nd Street, a cavernous former bank building converted into a restaurant, and raised $2.8 million in a single night, mostly from bankers and stockbrokers. (The 2003 fund-raiser, by comparison, pulled in $1.5 million.)
Financiers and C.E.O.'s are drawn to the Harlem Children's Zone not just because of its mission but also because of the way it is run. In fact, the relationship the organization has with its donors is as unusual, arguably, as the program itself. In the late 90's, Allen Grossman, then the president of Outward Bound U.S.A. and now a management professor at the Harvard Business School, began studying the nonprofit sector from a business perspective. It was a mess, he concluded: in an article in The Harvard Business Review in 1997, he described a hopelessly dysfunctional relationship between foundations and nonprofit organizations, in which foundations made short-term grants to pet projects, nonprofits spent all their time chasing money and each side had a vested interest in maintaining the reassuring fiction that failing programs were actually succeeding. Grossman proposed that philanthropists start thinking more like venture capitalists: searching out nonprofits with innovative long-term ideas, financing them early, insisting on transparency and frequent evaluation and nurturing them along the way with expert advice and continuing infusions of capital.
One of the first foundations to take Grossman's ideas seriously was the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which had been financing Rheedlen for years. In 1999, Nancy Roob, the foundation's grant manager, approached Canada and offered him $250,000, plus the dedicated services of a new management consultancy for nonprofits called the Bridgespan Group, to write a new business plan. This was unheard of: when philanthropists give away a quarter of a million dollars, they generally want the money to go directly to poor people, with as little overhead as possible. Clark, by contrast, was inviting Canada to spend the foundation's money -- first the $250,000, and eventually another $1 million -- entirely on overhead: on developing the business plan; creating a new, more hierarchical management structure; buying new technology for an internal communication system; and constructing a rigorous and continuing process of self-evaluation.
The business plan that Canada's team came up with proposed a steady increase in the annual budget over nine years, from $6 million to $10 million to $46 million. (This year, four years in, it is $24 million.) The plan reads more like a corporate strategy document than a charity prospectus. It refers to ''market-penetration targets'' and ''new information technology applications,'' including a ''performance-tracking system.'' In practice, too, the organization feels more like a business than a nonprofit, which offers comforting visuals to donors: everyone at the headquarters wears a suit, every meeting starts on time and there is a constant flow of evaluations, reports and budgets. ''Geoff could be a C.E.O. at any S.&P. 500 company,'' Druckenmiller said, and he meant it as a compliment.
uring the months I spent visiting Canada, the issue of education took up more and more of his time and attention. When we first spoke, almost a year ago, he described all of the organization's programs -- an initiative to combat asthma, an organizing campaign for tenants -- as equally important. But as the months wore on, it seemed, all he could think about were the problems in the schools. He was pouring more and more resources into Harlem's public schools, paying for in-class tutors and after-school reading programs, and scores had barely budged. He was beginning to see it as a systemic problem, he said, something that couldn't be solved by the kind of supplementary services he was offering. ''We've got to really do something radically different if we're going to save these kids,'' he told me in the fall. ''If we keep fooling around on the fringes, I know 10 years will go by, and instead of 75 percent of the kids in Harlem scoring below grade level on their reading scores, maybe it will be 70 percent, or maybe it will be 65 percent. People will say, 'Oh, we're making progress.' But that to me is not progress. This is much more urgent than that.''
So at the same time that he has been working inside the school system with a greater intensity than before, he has also begun to try to opt out of it, by establishing charter schools. Beginning in September, the Harlem Children's Zone plans to start educating its own students at two locations. The Promise Academy, which will eventually be a kindergarten-through-12th-grade charter school, will start with a kindergarten and sixth-grade class in September. The sixth grade will be housed in the organization's new headquarters on 125th Street; the kindergarten is expected to open inside an existing public school. The academy will expand over the course of seven years into a school of 1,300 students. The curriculum will be intense: classes will run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., five days a week -- an hour and a half longer than regular city schools. After-school programs will run until 6 p.m., and the school year will continue well into July.
Although charter schools are regulated by the state, and are outside the city's control, Joel I. Klein, the city's schools chancellor, has supported Canada's charter-school efforts. Canada said he sees Bloomberg and Klein as his allies, which is a strange feeling, he said, because for so long he felt as if he were at war with the school system. Soon after Klein was appointed, in the fall of 2002, he called Canada and set up a meeting. Canada said that the proposals Klein laid out for the entire school system -- greater accountability, more charter schools, more involvement for outside groups -- were exactly what Canada had been waiting to hear. In the summer of 2003, Klein appointed Lucille Swarns to be the regional superintendent for Upper Manhattan, and when Canada met her, he was once again pleasantly surprised.
''When I first came here in the early 1980's,'' Canada said, ''we felt that District 3'' -- which stretches from the Upper West Side into central Harlem -- ''ran a system almost of apartheid, where below 96th Street, the schools were doing great, and the schools we cared about were doing lousy.'' Even after his organization began spending a million dollars a year in the district's schools, he said, he never once got a call from the district superintendent. With Swarns things were different right away.
The most surprising aspect of the new collaboration between Klein and Canada is that the chancellor is encouraging the Harlem Children's Zone's plans to convert existing public schools in Harlem into charter schools. Canada has received conditional approval from Klein to start a slowly expanding charter school, beginning this fall with the Promise Academy's kindergarten class. As those children move through the school, the organization will take over control of an additional grade each year, sharing the building with the public school while gradually supplanting it. In six years, Canada explained, ''we're going to put the existing school out of business'' -- and he said he hopes that that school is only the beginning.
All of which makes skeptics, especially those in the teachers' union, wonder about Canada's motivation. Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that she used to be friendly with Canada, even attending his fund-raisers, until Bloomberg and Klein came into office and started making threatening noises toward her union. ''Since the mayor became mayor, Geoff Canada has stopped having any relationship with us,'' she said.
In her opinion, Canada's new attitude comes down to politics: ''I think what's happened is that they've decided that they'll work with the mayor, and that they won't work with the public-school system except through the mayor and the chancellor'' -- meaning that they won't work with the teachers' union. Canada often speaks of the opposition that his charter-school plan is going to face from the teachers' union and what he calls the educational establishment, but to Weingarten, it's the other way around: it's Canada who is picking this fight, demonizing the teachers' union in order to score political points with the mayor. ''They are working very secretly with the Board of Education and the Bloomberg administration'' on the charter-school plan, she said, a strategy that she said was shortsighted, not least because it is far from certain that Bloomberg will be re-elected. ''If you truly want schools to succeed,'' she said, ''you work with the people who represent the teachers.''
The battle between the teachers' union and City Hall has been going on for decades, but it has reached an unusually high pitch under Bloomberg. Canada clearly feels a genuine ideological kinship with the mayor, and with Klein, but there's also an immediate advantage to his alliance with them: his charter schools will use nonunion teachers; they will be paid more than public-school teachers, he said, but they will also work longer days, and for 12 months a year. Canada also wanted a free hand to fire teachers who weren't performing up to his expectations -- authority Canada said he felt sure the union would not give him. At his new school, he will have it.
n the days and weeks leading up to the charter-school lottery, the organization's outreach workers did exactly what Geoffrey Canada said they would do: they went door-to-door in housing projects, they tracked down recalcitrant mothers and fathers, they solicited applications from the parents of children in every one of their programs. And by the evening of the lottery, a rainy Tuesday in April, they had received 359 applications for just 180 slots -- 90 in the kindergarten class and 90 in the sixth grade. Legally, they could have held the lottery behind closed doors and simply mailed out acceptance letters, but Canada wanted it to be a real event, so he arranged to hold the lottery in public, in the auditorium of P.S. 242 on West 122nd Street.
By the time the lottery began, the place was packed. Every seat was filled with a hopeful parent or a prospective student or a patient sibling, and late arrivals were standing in the aisles or cramming themselves into the back of the room. Multicolored helium balloons were tied to the end of each row of seats, which gave the room a festive air, but more than anything the place felt nervous.
Canada took the stage. On a long table next to him, a gold drum held a jumble of index cards, each one printed with the name of a child. ''We are calling our school Promise Academy because we are making a promise to all of our parents,'' Canada said from behind a lectern. ''If your child is in our school, we will guarantee that child succeeds. There will be no excuses. We're not going to say, 'The child failed because they came from a home with only one parent.' We're not going to say, 'The child failed because they're new immigrants into the country.' If your child gets into our school, that child is going to succeed. If you work with us as parents, we are going to do everything -- and I mean everything -- to see that your child gets a good education.''
And then the drawing began, starting with the kindergarten class. Doreen Land, the charter schools' newly hired superintendent, read the first name into a microphone: ''Dijon Brinnard.'' A whoop went up from the back of the auditorium, and a jubilant mother started edging her way out of her row, proudly clutching the hand of her 4-year-old son. Land smiled and took the next card: ''Kasim-Seann Cisse.'' Another whoop, some applause and then another name.
At the front of the auditorium, Canada greeted each mother (or, occasionally, father) and child. Proud parents shook his hand and introduced their children, beaming on their way back to their seats. In the second row, a woman in her 40's, wearing an ''I Love New York'' T-shirt and a red nylon jacket, sat with her head bowed and her eyes shut tight, her lips moving in an anxious prayer. And then Land called the name ''Jaylene Fonseca,'' and the woman's eyes flew open. She made her way to the front, shook Canada's hand and then told me that her name was Wilma Jure and that Jaylene was her niece, a 4-year-old already enrolled in Harlem Gems. As her eyes filled with tears, she explained that Jaylene's mother, Jure's sister, was living in the city's shelter system for homeless families. Most nights, Jaylene slept with her mother in a shelter on 41st Street, then spent the day in Harlem Gems. ''It's an amazing program for people like us who really don't have the means to send our kids to get such a good education,'' Jure said. ''I mean, she's learning French,'' she added, a little incredulous. Now Jaylene was guaranteed a spot in the Promise Academy from kindergarten through the end of high school. It was hard not to feel that her life had just changed for the better, with the draw of a card.
As the evening wore on, though, the mood in the auditorium started to shift. The kindergarten lottery ended, the chosen students trooped out to the cafeteria for a group photo and the sixth-grade lottery began. In the front row, Virainia Utley sat with her daughter Janiqua, listening to the names being called. Utley is something of a model parent in the Harlem Children's Zone. Janiqua is in the Fifth Grade Institute at P.S. 242, and her three younger siblings -- Jaquan, Janisha and John -- are all enrolled in the computer-assisted after-school reading program. Utley is the vice president of her tenants' association, which was organized by Community Pride, the community-organizing division, and she is a regular presence at Zone events. When I first met her, months earlier, she was already talking about Janiqua going to the Promise Academy. But now the lottery numbers were rising -- 54, 55, 56 -- and her name hadn't yet been called.
After Land read out the 90th name, Canada took the stage again and explained to the remaining parents that it wasn't likely that there would be room for their children in the sixth grade. Land would read out the rest of the names and put them on a waiting list, he said, but this part wouldn't be much fun. He encouraged everyone to go home. Land went back to reading names, and Utley and Janiqua sat and listened, still in their seats, as the waiting list grew and the number of cards in the drum dwindled. By the time Land got to the 80th place on the waiting list, Utley told me, she and Janiqua were just waiting to make sure her name was called. Maybe her card got lost, she said, or stuck to another card. The room was thinning out, and the only remaining parents were angry ones. One by one they were letting Canada know how they felt. A line of parents came up to him to find out what could be done to get their children into the school, and he had to tell each one the same thing: nothing could be done. One woman, who was too angry to give me her name, spat out her complaint. ''It's not fair,'' she shouted. ''And I don't like it.'' Why drag everyone out on a rainy night, she wanted to know, just to sit in a public-school auditorium and feel like losers?
Finally, at No. 111 on the waiting list, Janiqua Utley's name was called, and her mother rose, took her by the hand and started up the aisle to the backdoor. As workers began sweeping up coffee cups and popped balloons, I sat down next to Canada. He looked exhausted, overwhelmed not only by the evening but also by the enormity of the task ahead of him. His eyes were watery, and as we talked, he dabbed periodically at his nose with his folded-up handkerchief. ''I was trying to get folks to leave and not to hang around to be the last kid called,'' he said. ''This is very hard for me to see. It's very, very sad. These parents feel, Well, there go my child's chances.''
It was a waiting list, I reminded him, that had started him on the path toward the Harlem Children's Zone more than a decade ago -- and now, despite all the millions of dollars, and the staff of 650 and the backing of the mayor, he is still setting up waiting lists. He nodded. ''We've got to do more,'' he said. ''We've got to do better.'' He sighed and looked up at the stage, where Land had just reached No. 150.
Paul Tough is an editor at The New York Times Magazine. |
