Harlem's Education Experiment Gone Right
Tuition at the Promise Academy is free, but there's not enough room for all the kids who live in the zone. So admission is by lottery.
This August, we watched as anxious parents waited to hear if their children would get in. There were 210 slots open for a new Kindergarten class, but 375 kids had applied.
As the slots filled up, some parents left waiting began to realize their child's chances of success in life had just been reduced.
There were a lot of very angry parents. "And they were accusing me, right, 'Geoff, how could you do this to a three-year-old?' 'This is not right, Geoff.' And I would say, 'No, no, you're right, it's not right,'" Canada said.
"You look into those mothers' eyes and those fathers' eyes and you see the fear and the terror and the clear understanding that the system is designed so that their kids are probably not going to make it if they don't get in," Canada added.
On the importance of being able to fire people who don't perform:
"We promise our families if your children are with us, we guarantee they're going to get into college and we're going to stick with them through college, right? So that's a promise," Canada said.
Asked how he can actually promise that they will go to college, Canada told Cooper, "If my kids don't go to college, people who work for me are losing their jobs. And there's just no way around that."
"You'll fire the teachers," Cooper remarked.
"I will fire the teachers. I'll fire the after school workers. I'll fire the directors. Everybody understands that this thing is our job as the adults. And we're not gonna hold the kids responsible, right? And are some of my kids belligerent? Yes. Do some of 'em come in and don't try hard? Yes, they do. Do they come from broken homes? Yes. Is there poverty and drugs and crime? Yes, it's all those things. Those kids are still going to college," Canada said.
On the power of financial incentives for kids:
To make sure his kids succeed, Canada will do just about anything. For the younger kids who ace their statewide tests, there are free trips. And he pays high schoolers up to $120 a month if they get near perfect attendance and grades.
"Aren't you kind of basically bribing them?" Cooper asked.
"I love to bribe kids," Canada said, laughing. "People say, 'Well, Geoff, don't you want kids to do it for the intrinsic value of ed?' Sure, I'd love them to do it for the intrinsic value. And until then, I'd love them to do it for money. I don't care. I just want 'em to do it."
Finally, here's Harvard economist Roland Fryer on how a high-performing school can totally change the game:
Even more impressive, Canada's impact on middle schoolers, kids who enrolled in the Promise Academy in the sixth grade. They started out far behind grade level, but Fryer found that within three years they had virtually eliminated the achievement gap in math, and reduced it by nearly half in reading.
"These are kids that a lot of people had given up on. And he showed that it's never too late," Fryer said.
Asked if it changes the way he looks at the problem, Fryer told Cooper, "It does. Because here's an analogy. We're ten touchdowns down in the fourth quarter. We kick a field goal and everyone celebrates, right? That's kind of useless. We're still 67 points down."
"You're still losing," Cooper remarked.
"Okay. We're not just losin'. We're gettin' crushed. All right? What Geoff Canada has shown is that we can actually win the game," Fryer said.
Here are two web-only extras: Lost Boy: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5914292n (1:18) and The Hot Seat: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5914278n (1:37)
Harlem's Education Experiment Gone Right
Anderson Cooper Reports on Education Pioneer Geoffrey Canada's Huge Success
Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone has helped put historically low-achieving students in New York on academic par with their grammar-school peers. CNN's Anderson Cooper reports.
While interviewing students for his story on the Harlem Children's Zone, Anderson Cooper ended up being interviewed himself.
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/04/60minutes/main5889558.shtml
(CBS) For years, educators have tried and failed to get poor kids from the inner city to do just as well in school as kids from America's more affluent suburbs. Black kids still routinely score well below white kids on national standardized tests.
But a man named Geoffrey Canada may have figured out a way to close that racial achievement gap. What he's doing has been called one of the most ambitious social experiments to alleviate poverty of our lifetime. His laboratory is a 97-block neighborhood in Harlem, which he has flooded with a wide array of social, medical and educational services available for free to the 10,000 children who live there. It is called the "Harlem Children's Zone."
Harlem Children's Zone
The Education Innovation Laboratory
Web Extra: The Hot Seat
Web Extra: Lost Boy
Read/Watch: Ed Bradley's 2006 Report
posted by Whitney Tilson at 5:51 PM
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