The Promise of the Harlem Children's Zone

On February 10, 2014, press organizations across the country broke the news that Geoffrey Canada would be stepping down from his post as CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, ending his more than two-decade run as head of the nationally recognized nonprofit. Though the HCZ’s work will continue, Canada’s resignation serves as an opportunity to reflect on the work that he and his organization have accomplished over the past 25 years. During Canada’s tenure as CEO, what started out as a small anti-poverty pilot project covering a single block in Harlem has become arguably the single most important social policy experiment in America.
Today, the Harlem Children’s Zone provides comprehensive “cradle-to-career” services to more than 8,000 children and 6,000 adults across nearly 100 blocks in Harlem. According to a recent paper published by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, students at the HCZ’s Promise Academy middle school have erased the racial achievement gap that has persisted in every urban school district in America as far back as data have been collected.
Canada’s success has drawn national attention. In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama announced his plan to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the United States. As of the 2010 fiscal year, the Obama administration had allocated over $60 million to programs modeled on Canada’s work in cities including Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington as a part of the newly created Promise Neighborhoods initiative. As the Promise Neighborhoods initiative gets underway, important questions remain. How did the Harlem Children’s Zone succeed? And how can we replicate that success in other cities?
Canada’s Approach
Traditionally, most nonprofit organizations have focused on only one aspect of poverty at a time—working to improve educational opportunities, expand access to affordable housing, or provide better health care services. However, through his work with the HCZ’s precursor, the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, Canada came to believe that all of these issues were deeply intertwined, and that addressing only one issue at a time was not enough to win the war on poverty. Moreover, Canada was convinced that anti-poverty efforts had to be not just comprehensive but also widely accessible, engaging a large enough segment of the community to reach a “tipping point” that would produce real social change. In order to have options in life, Canada believed, his kids would need access to a good education. His mission was simple: Every kid in the Children’s Zone would graduate from college.
When Canada founded the Harlem Children’s Zone in 1994, his goals seemed decidedly unrealistic. The kids that Canada was seeking to help lived in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in America: More than 60 percent of students came from families below the poverty line, and more than three quarters scored below grade level on state reading and math tests. Famously, a 1990 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the life expectancy for a young man growing up in Harlem was shorter than for one in poverty-stricken Bangladesh.
But Canada would not be deterred. Launching what the New York Times Magazine has called “one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time,” he constructed a pipeline to opportunity for children in the Zone, including free parenting workshops, fitness and nutrition classes, early education, after-school enrichment, tutoring services, college prep, job training programs, access to health care, and two new charter schools.
Canada’s results speak for themselves. Last year, 99.5 percent of four-year-olds attending the “Harlem Gems” pre-school program attained a school readiness classification of average or above. One hundred percent of third-graders at the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy I and II tested at or above grade level on the state math exam. One hundred percent of participants in high school after-school programs stayed in school. And 90 percent of the HCZ’s high school graduates were accepted into college.
Because the HCZ took such a comprehensive approach, however, it remains unclear which particular programs were most important to the Zone’s success. Was it the early education programs? The parenting classes? The high-achieving charter schools? These questions are particularly important to other organizations seeking to replicate the HCZ’s work, and they speak to a question at the heart of the education reform conversation in America: What does it take to close the achievement gap?
Are Schools Enough?
Over the last 50 years, the American education system has tried and failed to close the achievement gap between wealthy white kids and minority students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Today, only 15 percent of eighth grade students from lower-income backgrounds are “proficient” readers, compared to 83 percent of students from higher-income backgrounds. By the end of high school, black and Hispanic students’ reading and math skills are, on average, roughly equivalent to those of white students in eighth grade. No major urban school district in the U.S. has ever closed the gap. Moreover, the doubling of per pupil expenditures and almost one-third reduction in class size that has taken place nationally over the last 40 years has had little impact on the size of the gap.
Two major narratives attempt to explain this inability to close the achievement gap. The first claims that our school system is broken, while the second posits that schools alone are not enough to close the gap. On the one hand, school reform advocates point to individual charter schools that have managed to close the gap in recent years, arguing that improving the quality of our public schools is the key to closing the achievement gap. On the other hand, proponents of the community-driven approach argue that many of the issues students face originate outside the classroom, and that additional outside-of-school supports are therefore necessary in order to help students succeed.
Ideology aside, the debate about how to close the achievement gap comes down to a question of economics: What is the best way to intervene in kids’ lives to help them succeed? In a world of limited resources, we can’t do all things. Should we focus our investments on school reform or on community supports?
Evidence from the HCZ
Proponents of the community-centered approach to reform have argued that the HCZ’s incredible results prove that comprehensive social services are what is needed to give disadvantaged students the chance to succeed. However, in addition to a wide array of wraparound community programs, the HCZ also managed a set of “Promise Academy” schools for its students. These schools implemented many of the same practices used in other high-achieving charter schools, including a longer school day, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, and a culture of high expectations.
According to a 2011 paper published by Fryer, it was actually the HCZ’s high-performing middle and elementary schools that were primarily responsible for closing the achievement gap for its students, with the other set of social services provided by Canada’s group having a much weaker impact. Since not all students in the zone attend the Promise Academies, Fryer was able to estimate the schools’ effect on the achievement gap by comparing the test scores of students who attended the schools to those who did not. Ultimately, Fryer concludes that “high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor,” while “community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient.”
However, advocates of the comprehensive approach to school reform argue that test scores alone do not capture the full effect of social programs on students’ lives. Former Boston Superintendent of Schools Thomas Payzant is a co-founder of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education coalition, which advocates for a more comprehensive approach to education reform. As Dr. Payzant explained in an interview with the HPR, “when you’re evaluating a comprehensive program like [the HCZ], you need to look much more broadly than just test scores.” Indeed, research has shown that effective early education programs may significantly improve their participants’ life outcomes despite showing little effect on test scores. As a result, it may be necessary to follow HCZ participants longitudinally to determine the true effect of non-academic social programs.
Promise for the Future?
In 2012, the Department of Education awarded five-year implementation grants to seven new Promise Neighborhood initiatives to “execute community-led plans that improve and provide better social services and educational programs.” While many observers have lauded the Obama administration for working to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in cities across the country, there are at least two reasons to be skeptical that the new Promise Neighborhoods will meet with the same level of success that Canada’s group did in New York.
First, many of the new Promise Neighborhoods are attempting to replicate the HCZ’s wraparound community programs without reproducing its high-performing charter schools. According to school reform advocates, these new Promise Neighborhoods are missing the point; as Fryer’s research has demonstrated, the HCZ’s success was built on the foundation of its two Promise Academies. The Harlem Children’s Zone showed that ambitious community programs can make a big difference when paired with aggressive school reform efforts, not that community programs alone are enough to get the job done. By this logic, Promise Neighborhoods that reproduce the HCZ’s parenting classes and after-school activities are unlikely to close the achievement gap unless they also undertake serious school reform.
Second, even if wraparound community supports can make an impact in the absence of school reform, the Promise Neighborhoods program must receive adequate funding in order to achieve success. However, Promise Neighborhoods like the Boston Promise Initiative are receiving only $1.2 million in federal funding per year, less than one-sixtieth of the HCZ’s annual budget. As HCZ biographer Paul Tough noted in an interview, “What the HCZ has helped show is that these interventions can be expensive, and that doing them on the cheap is likely not as effective.”
Why We Can’t Wait
If Promise Neighborhoods modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone have the potential to close the achievement gap in urban America, then investing in their success is crucial. The achievement gap in America is not only a profound injustice but also an economic disaster; according to an analysis conducted by McKinsey and Company, the achievement gap reduces American output by as much as $500 billion each year, the equivalent of a permanent national recession. Though investing in high-quality programs may not be cheap, the rewards are well worth it. Perhaps President Obama should heed his own advice and make fully funding the Promise Neighborhoods initiative a top priority for his administration: as the president put it when he first proposed the initiative in 2008, “[this] can’t be done on the cheap, but we will find the money to do this because we can’t afford not to.”
Similarly, while implementing fundamental school reform may not always be politically easy, our elected leaders need to stand up for our children and for the future of our country. Now that the Harlem Children’s Zone has shown that every child can succeed if given the right opportunities, we need to do everything in our power to extend those same opportunities to students across America. As Obama put it in his second inaugural, “we are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”