When Canada Came To Harlem
Harlem educator Geoffrey Canada seems to be of the mind that I am, that the black-white achievement gap is less about money than about culture. Last year, I started doing talks at an inner-city school to try to help give the kids a sense of what's possible if you're willing to work your ass off (and not knock girls up or get knocked up and perpetuate the single motherhood and daddylessness that perpetuates the cycle of poverty, hopelessness, and crime as a career choice).

I just got an e-mail from the teacher who's been scheduling me in. It sounds like I can start again in February and maybe start bringing other speakers. If you live in Los Angeles, and are self-made (not from a rich family) and do something cool for a living (especially if it's something like being a chef that doesn't take a college education), maybe you would be a candidate. A few details follow at the bottom of this blog item. If you think you'd fit the bill, e-mail me and tell me why.

Back to Geoffrey Canada, Kay Hymowitz writes on City Journal that he's trying to educate young pregnant women in how to parent and trying to change cultural attitudes toward education:

His staff pounded the pavement in a 24-block zone searching for pregnant young women to enroll in a workshop called Baby College. (Over time, the Zone would grow to 97 blocks.) There, they would learn the sorts of behaviors that middle-class parents seem to adopt intuitively: reading to their young children, teaching them to observe and think, stimulating them, and using soft power--in other words, distraction and negotiation--rather than resorting to "Beat Ass Early," as Tough describes one couple's preferred method of discipline.

Early in HCZ's evolution, Canada discovered that he had to get to poor kids as early in their lives as possible; when he first opened Promise Academy, a charter middle school, almost 60 percent of the sixth-graders arrived with third-grade reading skills or lower, and he never could bring them up to a level that satisfied his funders. He also had to contend with the notorious "fade-out" effect--the tendency of the immediate gains of early childhood education for disadvantaged kids to vanish by third grade. His solution was what he called a "conveyor belt," a series of self-reinforcing programs, beginning with Baby College and continuing with a school for three-year-olds, prekindergarten, kindergarten, a K-12 extended-day-and-year charter school, and afterschool programs. What he imagined was less like the conventional piecemeal social welfare programs that had been tried--and tried again--in the past, and more akin to a religious revival that would imbue its followers with middle-class aspirations and the skills needed to realize them.

It's easy enough to share Tough's sympathy for Canada and his project. The Harlem Children's Zone, which costs $60 million per year, is research-based and accountable to its funders. Canada is devoted, savvy, and ambitious. Some might say too ambitious. The HCZ is predicated on the idea that educators can, in Tough's words, "compensate for any kind of childhood" on a mass scale; indeed, that they can "heal" the culture of an entire community. But at this point, while some elementary-school test scores look promising, there isn't much evidence for such hopes' becoming reality. By 2007, only a small group of third-graders had spent five years on Canada's conveyor belt. It will be over a decade before we know whether they're going to college, not to mention graduating.

And the question remains whether Canada's template can be imitated across the country. The list of seemingly successful initiatives that have foundered on the journey to replication is endless, and the HCZ's interwoven tapestry of programs is more complex than most. Canada, his staff, and his generous funders also bring a sense of urgency, devotion, and flexibility to their cause that will inevitably be sapped by the bureaucratic planning required to reproduce the programs in 20 faraway cities.

It's an old story, really: everyone thinks they've found The Policy Answer when what they've really spotted is brilliant local leadership. It's a story the Obama administration would be wise to remember.

By the way, I'll find out in a few days whether this speaker program, which I proposed for a big grant, will be in the running to get funding. The funding would not go to the speakers (who, like me, will be volunteers) but to an excellent national organization that helps "at-risk youth." The organization would execute and administer the program on a national level, with speakers going in to talk to kids every three months during the school year, from the youngest grades on up. An excerpt from my write-up:

Inner-city kids see only hopelessness around them. Kids who could do something with their lives -- have a career, a business, make a difference -- needlessly end up in dead-end, minimum-wage jobs; in part, because they see no reason it makes sense to hope for anything more.

This program sends these kids living, breathing role models -- self-made successes with cool jobs who deconstruct their path, showing that their success wasn't magic, and they aren't geniuses, but ordinary people who made it through perseverance and hard work.

Speakers present their life history and career history, warts and all. They explain ways they chose poorly along the way, and embrace their failures as part of succeeding.

Speakers take questions -- talking openly on life and careers -- and respond to kids' fears. They address kids of all aptitudes -- advising kids (college-bound or not) to seek jobs where they can learn and a boss or other successful person to mentor them. The program is secular, but includes a message about how teen pregnancy derails the opportunities discussed by the speaker, and likely leads to lives of poverty for teen mothers and their children.

...People talk about providing poor kids with equal opportunity. This takes much more than simply giving kids in South Central L.A. the same textbooks that they use in Beverly Hills. We need to show at-risk kids, starting in the earliest elementary school grades on up, that it isn't ridiculous for them to believe they can do something with their lives. And we do that by bringing in role models -- ordinary people who've built a business, made a difference, done something with their lives -- to show the kids that it makes sense for them to dream of having a better life, and to break down the steps to get there.

Please feel free to "steal" this program and start it in a school near you.