bookmark: ‘Whatever it Takes’ to teach Harlem’s Youth
New York Times journalist Paul Tough profiles educational visionary Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children’s Zone—currently serving more than 7,000 children and encompassing 97 city blocks—represents an audacious effort to end poverty within underserved communities.
Canada’s radical experiment is predicated upon changing everything in these communities—creating an interlocking web of services targeted at the poorest and least likely to succeed children: establishing programs to prepare and support parents, a demanding k-8 charter school and a range of after-school programs for high school students.
Tough adeptly integrates the intensely personal stories of the staff, students and teachers of the Children’s Zone with expert opinions and the broiling debates over poverty, race and education. The author’s admiration for Canada and his social experiment is obvious yet tempered by journalistic restraint as he summarizes the current understanding of the causes of poverty and academic underperformance—and their remedies. Smoothly narrated, affecting and heartening, this book gives readers a solid look at the problems facing poor communities and their reformers, as well as good cause to be optimistic about the future. – Excerpted from Publisher’s Weekly
Listen to the NPR interview here.
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Geoff Canada rocks, and I urge you all to learn more about him, the Harlem Childrens’ Zone, and support his efforts. He’ll need you more now that the Wall St folks have gone bust, and can no longer help to fund his educational programs.
He is single-handledly trying to reverse decades of neglect by local government, so-called ‘community’ leaders, by families, parents and communities – by giving children a real education, and hope for a different life.
You only have to walk the streets and see the trash, the abuse, the crime, the drugs, the neglect, the hate, to understand that the kids who live here need all the help they can get – cos they aint getting it from those around them, and certainly not from their parents.
Not all here are bad, and those parents and families that are trying for their children, they need all the help they can get.
Geoff Canada iis a real leader, whose actions are lounder than his words (unlike so many in this commuity). He is combing the streets to find those who need help. Now he needs your help.