01 March 2009
Geoffrey Canada: A Children’s Conveyor Belt
This article appears in the March 2009 issue of eJournal USA, Nonviolent Paths to Social Change (PDF, 783 KB).
Geoffrey Canada is one of the lucky ones: an African-American kid growing up in a grim New York City neighborhood who escaped its violence, poverty, and derelict schools to earn a master’s degree in education from Harvard University. But Canada didn’t forget his roots; he immediately went to work in New York’s Harlem neighborhood as an educator and child advocate.
Canada had not only made it out himself, but also was now helping hundreds of other poor, at-risk, inner-city children. Yet that wasn’t enough, he decided.
A Chicago Public Radio program called This American Life describes how, by the 1980s, Canada realized that saving just a few children wasn’t going to end generational poverty in Harlem or anywhere else; his organization needed to try and save just about everyone.
“In order to truly make a difference,” he said, “we were going to have to think really big. We were going to have to work with children in the thousands, going to ten thousands. And we were going to have to work with these children from birth right on through until they graduated from college.”
His vision was both unprecedented and expensive. But Canada, 58, an intense, charismatic man, is successfully implementing it through the Harlem’s Children Zone (HCZ), which now covers more than 10,000 children with comprehensive educational, medical, and social services in central Harlem with an annual budget estimated at $40 million for 2009.
Canada’s accomplishments are drawing widespread attention from leaders as a model for how to break poverty’s iron grip through an absolute commitment to children and their welfare — a commitment summed up in the title of a new book about Canada’s work: Whatever It Takes, by Paul Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine. Among them is President Barack Obama, who during the 2008 presidential campaign praised the Harlem Children’s Zone as “an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck antipoverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children in a neighborhood where they were never supposed to have a chance.”
Observers are impressed not only with Canada’s vision, but also with his results. Last year, almost 100 percent of all HCZ third-graders tested at or above grade level on state tests, an unprecedented result for an inner-city New York school.
One element that Canada emphasizes is early exposure to language, building on research showing that a key difference between poor and professional families is neither race nor income, but, as author Tough says, “the sheer number of words your parents spoke to you as a child.”
Researchers found that in middle-class families, children from birth to three years old — a period of maximum brain development — heard as many as 20 million more words (often the same words repeated) than poor children. In other words, something as simple as reading to a child every single night, which HCZ urges of all its parents, can produce enormous, positive results in the child’s life.
But reading is only one key to Canada’s revolutionary approach, which he terms “the conveyor belt,” meaning that HCZ doesn’t just intervene with children at certain times, but provides a full range of services, all free, “from cradle to college.” The conveyor belt begins with HCZ’s celebrated Baby College for pregnant and new mothers, followed by the Harlem Gems pre-school program and Promise Academy charter schools — all supplemented by free medical and dental care, after-school programs, and such special services as fitness programs to combat obesity and treat rampant childhood asthma. And then, as this first generation grows, HCZ will remain with them through secondary school and college.
“They get what middle-class and upper-middle-class kids get,” Canada told the television newsmagazine 60 Minutes. “They get safety. They get structure. They get academic enrichment. They get cultural activity. They get adults who love them and are prepared to do anything. And, I mean, I’m prepared to do anything to keep these kids on the right track.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
