(L) A student gets free dental care. (R) Promoting the healthy kitchen and farmer’s market.
t’s not the first question visitors ask, but you can see it in the darting eyes as folks walk through the halls teeming with students and staff. “What’s the secret?” they want to know. “How can Harlem Children’s Zone (HZC) get thousands of poor children to succeed academically where hundreds of programs and billions of dollars have failed?” Visitors want to see “the curriculum,” the lesson plans, the data. They wonder if anyone can replicate HCZ’s work without our charismatic CEO Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.’75. And, of course, a few folks are just plain suspicious and wait with knife and fork in hand for any morsel of bad news to satisfy their insatiable cynicism. Well, there is a secret (spoiler alert): it’s hard work over the long haul. The Harlem Children’s Zone Project targets a 97-blockarea of Central Harlem with an interlocking network of education, social service, and community-building programs for children, from birth through college, and the adults around them. As the communications director of the agency for the past eight years, my favorite description of the agency is from a friend: “They do everything but come and wake you up in the morning.” The truth is, I learned, that the staff would to that, too, if that’s what was necessary. At HCZ we talk about a “pipeline” of services, but it is actually two parallel pipelines: One for children who go to our K–12 charter schools; the other for children who live in the neighborhood and go to traditional public schools. Both start with our early education programs. We have outreach workers scouring the neighborhood, looking for pregnant women and parents of young children for The Baby College, a nine-week series of workshops that teach a range of parenting skills. It’s a great program, but the outreach workers use all sorts of enticements — free childcare, a weekly raffle, free diapers — to get parents in because we want all of them, the good and particularly the bad. Then we have our hooks in them — and them in our database — hopefully for the next 20 years or so. Whatever It Takes is the title of Paul Tough’s excellent account of the organization’s work, and it has become the informal motto of the staff, who say it with a smile and a roll
of the eyes as they dive into the latest crisis. And the crises come with stunning regularity since we work with more than 11,000 children, many of whom face daily drama that would make grand opera seem drab by comparison. “We’re trying to create a community where children are our permanent interest,” says Canada, “and a child who has struggled is connected to a series of adults who stay with the child over long periods of time. This idea that we’re investing in children as a team over time is central to our work.” At HCZ, we just shake our heads when people criticize Head Start, for example, by saying it doesn’t make a difference for children ultimately. What do people expect when ontrack four-year-olds are tossed into substandard schools for the rest of their academic career, and with a battery of other disadvantages, including the ever-present threat of violence? Although HCZ has been fortunate to receive glowing press attention, the coverage has sometimes highlighted our charter schools and obscured our work with children in traditional public schools. In fact, the original business plan of the HCZ Project did not include charter schools. When the opportunity arose, Canada, who had watched public schools fail for decades, jumped at the opportunity to deliver a great school to large numbers of poor children. The result was Promise Academy I, which opened in 2004, and Promise Academy II, which opened in 2005. “We make the same guarantee to children in traditional public schools,” he says. “If you stick with us, you will get into and through college.” Today, HCZ works with all seven of the traditional public elementary schools in the Zone, serving more than 2,400 students. We also work with more than 900 middle school students who don’t attend our charter school and 1,080 Harlem high schoolers. More than 700 students from these afterschool programs are now in college. While some have painted Canada with a broad brush as “anti-union,” he is simply opposed to anyone and anything that does not put children first. That commitment defines him in the fields of politics and policy, but also makes him a relentless, no-excuses manager. “If my mother worked here and she messed up,” Canada once told a staffer, “I’d fire her.” This year marks a milestone for the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy I charter school: It graduates its first class of high-school seniors — and all of them will be going to college in the fall. Recently I sat down with Principal Marquitta Speller in her office, which typically clatters with the daily drama and comedy of teenagers, and we looked through a list of her seniors. I asked what would have happened if these kids had not won the school admission lottery six years ago. “We have 62 seniors,” she says, ruefully shaking her head. “You would have maybe five that on their own would say, ‘OK, I’m doing this, I’m going to college.’ “I don’t have a crystal ball,” she continues, “but if they didn’t have these services, they would not have made it. A few would have become pregnant. …Some A Baby College session. boys would have been locked up.”