Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America

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Overview

That was the question Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children - not one by one but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives - their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.

President Obama has called the Harlem ...

See more details below

More About This Book

Overview

That was the question Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children - not one by one but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives - their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.

President Obama has called the Harlem Children's Zone an "all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck antipoverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children" and has vowed to reproduce it in twenty cities across the country. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, Whatever It Takes is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

Editorial Reviews

Donna Foote
Canada called his crusade the Harlem Children's Zone and chose a 24-block section of Harlem as his laboratory. Paul Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, began tracking the effort in 2003. The result is Whatever It T akes, a you-are-there recording of the project's development, amazing growth and potential promise—and an informed primer on the correlation between race, poverty and the achievement gap in America. This is a serious book about a pressing issue, but Tough manages to make it an easy read with a cast of sympathetic characters…We don't know how this story will end. Time will tell if Geoffrey Canada has hit on what it will take to break the cycle of poverty in America. In the meantime, there are lessons to be learned from the Harlem Children's Zone—about the power of an idea, the role culture plays in student achievement, accountability, the indomitable human spirit. This book should be on every policymaker's reading list.
—The Washington Post
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
…when it comes to an introduction to the debate about poverty and parenting in urban America, you could hardly do better than Tough's book. The children of the uneducated and impoverished too often bear a gloomy inheritance, their futures set in stone from an early age. Within Canada's 97 blocks, Tough finds a different kind of legacy—one shaped by parents who have learned to pay attention to their children's developmental needs. With a support network unlike anything else in America, the children of Harlem can envision a future so many others expect as a matter of course.
—The New York Times

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780618569892
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Publication date: 8/12/2008
  • Pages: 304
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Paul Tough is an editor at the New York Times Magazine and one of America's foremost writers on poverty, education, and the achievement gap. His reporting on Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone originally appeared as a Times Magazine cover story. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

B y the time Geoffrey Canada arrived at the Promise Academy lottery, the auditorium was almost full. He had expected a modest turnout—he figured the rain would keep a lot of parents away—but by 6:00 p.m. more than two hundred people had crowded into the back of the hall, and there were dozens more still streaming in the front door. Here and there, members of Canada’s staff were consulting clipboards and calming anxious parents. His director of education hurried past him, shouting into her cell phone. It was April 14, 2004, a cool, wet night in Harlem. The hand-lettered sign out front of PS 242, streaked with raindrops, said "Welcome to the Promise Academy Charter School Lottery," and inside, past the sign-in table set up in the school’s front hallway, a tall, bull-chested young man named Jeff was handing a rose to each woman as she walked in. "These are for the moms," he said with a smile. "Welcome to the ceremony."

Canada, a tall, thin black man in a dark blue suit, surveyed the crowd. From what he could see, the parents taking their seats in the auditorium were the ones he had hoped to attract: typical Harlem residents, mostly African American, some Hispanic, almost all poor or working class, all struggling to one degree or another with the challenges of raising and educating children in one of New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods. In many ways, their sons and daughters were growing up the way Canada had, four decades before, just a few miles away in the South Bronx: cut off from the American mainstream, their futures constrained by substandard schools, unstable families, and a segregated city.

Five years earlier, frustrated by Harlem’s seemingly intractable problems, Canada had embarked on an outsized and audacious new endeavor, a poverty-fighting project that was different from anything that had come before it. Since 1990, he had been the president of a well-respected local non profit organization called the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, which operated a handful of programs in upper Manhattan targeted at young people: afterschool drop-in centers, truancy prevention, antiviolence training for teenagers. They were decent programs, and they all did some good for the kids who were enrolled in them. But after Canada had been running them 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 afterschool 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 five hundred children who were lucky enough to be participating in one of his programs were getting help, but why those five hundred and not the five hundred on the waiting list? Or why not another five hundred altogether? For that matter, why five hundred and not five thousand? If all he was doing was picking some kids to save and letting the rest fail, what was the point?

Canada became less and less sure of what his programs really added up to. Each one was supported by a separate short-term grant, often on a contract from one city agency or another, and in order to keep the money fl owing, Canada was required to demonstrate to the foundations and agencies that paid for the programs that a certain number of children had par tic i pated. But no one seemed to care whether the programs were ac tually working. In fact, no one seemed to have given a whole lot of thought to what, in this context, "working" might really mean.

Canada began to wonder what would happen if he reversed the equation. Instead of coming up with a menu of well-meaning programs and then trying to figure out what they accomplished and how they fit together, what if he started with the out comes he wanted to achieve and then worked backward from there, changing and tweaking and overhauling programs until they actually produced the right results? When he followed this train of thought a little further, he realized that it wasn’t the out comes of individual programs that he really cared about: what mattered was the overall impact he was able to have on the children he was trying to serve. He was all too familiar with the "fade-out" phenomenon, where a group of needy kids are helped along by one program or another, only to return to the disappointing mean soon after the program ends. Head Start, the government-funded prekindergarten program for poor children, was the classic example. Plenty of studies had determined conclusively that graduates of Head Start entered kindergarten ahead of their inner-city peers. And plenty of studies had shown that a few years later, those same graduates had slipped back to the anemic achievement level of neighborhood kids who hadn’t attended Head Start. A few years of bad schooling and bad surroundings were powerful enough to wipe out all of the program’s gains.

Canada wanted to find a way off the treadmill. So he asked himself a series of questions, and gradually his thinking took shape.

Table of Contents

1 The Lottery 1

2 Unequal Childhoods 21

3 Baby College 53

4 Contamination 98

5 Battle Mode 126

6 Bad Apples 155

7 Last Chance 174

8 The Conveyor Belt 188

9 Escape Velocity 213

10 Graduation 234

11 What Would It Take? 257

Acknowledgments 271

Notes 276

Index 286

Customer Reviews
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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 13, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    Interesting if you're into it

    I believe, as do many of my colleagues, that Whatever it Takes should be required reading for all new teachers and professors. As one embarks on a career in education, it is necessary to remind oneself yet again of the flaws of the American education system and those children that it ultimately fails to help.

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  • Posted August 13, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    A Must For Inner City Teachers

    Anyone who teaches, is an administrator or wants to work in education should read this book. It traces not only the work of Canada, but also the educational studies that have been done over the years, some of good service and some exposing stereotypes and bad information. This should be required reading for inner city studies programs and for those who really care about making a difference through their efforts to educate children, especially those who don't have the resources found in most middle and upper class families. The concept of beginning to enlighten parents before a child is born and continuing this through the "conveyor belt system" of early childhood to preschool will make a lot of sense. It also reminds us that the "heroic measures" in education of turning a low achieving junior high student into a high achieving high school student is possible but not probable. It all begins at the beginning. This is where success starts... with shapes, sizes and descriptive words as well as exposure at home to vocabulary words and other learning opportunities. Canada's story must be told nationwide. READ THIS BOOK!

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  • Posted October 27, 2008

    more from this reviewer

    School reform takes more than reforming schools

    Whatever It Takes traces the efforts of the Harlem Children's Zone and its founder Geoffrey Canada to give kids living in Harlem a chance. More than that, it chronicles the HCZ's efforts to ensure that each child, no matter his or her background or family situation, has the opportunity to go to college. Taking occasional short detours to survey the political and academic background behind comprehensive school reform, the consensus appears that it will take more than just dedicated teachers--a full intervention into the fabric of the community surrounding at-risk kids is required. The question, however, is just that: exactly how much *will* it take?

    We find there are no simple answers, but telling the story is a necessary step on the path to understanding, and ultimately correcting, the problems that ail our poorer neighborhoods--and, while the emphasis in this book is clearly on the urban setting of the Harlem Children's Zone, the lessons should be the same for rural areas facing many of the same problems. By the end, I wished that Tough had spent more time on the non-school programs that complement the efforts of HCZ's Promise Academy at the K-12 level, but within its focus Whatever It Takes remains a fantastic exploration of the issues that confront school reform and repairing our social fabric.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 19, 2008

    Can We Solve Poverty, This Books Suggests Yes

    this book describes an effort to assist and change the lives of wretchedly poor folks in Harlem. the solution is the kids. teach the parents how best to parent, and provide all manner of support. the only bad news is that we may not be able to do anything for the parents themselves. the Harlem Children's Zone is fairly new, but as far as we can tell, what they offer works. please read it, and pass it on to all of good will.

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