Thriving In The Zone

Regardless of your personal feelings towards charter schools and/or "Waiting for Superman" this is an amazing article on the work that Geoffrey Canada has achieved at the Harlem Children's Zone.  The article also speaks to the growing needs our students have and how important meeting those needs in urban areas is if students are going to achieve and thrive academically.



Geoffrey Canada speaking with students at HCZ.

The Harlem Children's Zone, which serves 8,600 low-income children on 60 New York City blocks, isn't doing much new: It has smart-parenting classes; it has all-day preschool; it's phasing in a K-12 charter school. It has tutoring and mentoring and antiviolence initiatives.

The angel is in the details--in the superior way the zone delivers its programs with the help of a skilled staff, wealthy backers, and, most important, a 53-year-old executive named Geoffrey Canada, a brainy, driven leader with rare crossover appeal. "He's got the street walk and Harvard talk," says Ray Marte, one of Canada's first students. "He can talk to the block and the boardroom," says Shawn Dove, a former Zone staffer and Canada protege.

And can the man talk. Canada, at 6 feet, looks Jordanesque with a shaved head, graying goatee, and gangly build. And he sounds Clintonesque, deploying humor and outrage, statistics and stories to make his case for saving kids. "It's not rocket science we're doing here," he likes to say. "It's harder than rocket science."

Still, the Harlem Children's Zone is in many ways a success story in a field starved for them. From its headquarters at 125th Street and Madison Avenue, the program provides a full network of services to an entire needy neighborhood. It combines educational, social, and medical services, covering participants from birth all the way through college.

Canada has two key aims: to rescue large numbers of impoverished Harlem children and, in so doing, to provide an irresistible model for policymakers to adopt and fund. They are indeed no small tasks. The first requires changing the Harlem mind-set so that more than just the super-resilient few succeed, he says. "If we can get Harlem to the place where passing is the normal thing, staying out of jail is normal, guys growing up and getting jobs is normal, that, to me, is victory."

Full Article: Thriving in the Zone