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Summary
Summary
What would it take?
That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children--not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives--their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.
Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.
Author Notes
PAUL TOUGH is an editor at the New York Times Magazine and one of America's foremost writers on poverty, education, and the achievement gap. His reporting on Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone originally appeared as a Times Magazine cover story. He lives with his wife in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
New York Times journalist 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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Canada has captured national attention with his bold effort to offer a cradle-to-college program for thousands of underprivileged children in Harlem. Tough, a New York Times Magazine writer, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the dramatic ups and downs of the Harlem Children's Zone, a $58 million project encompassing 97 city blocks and serving 7,000 children. Tough details Canada's own personal struggle out of poverty as a motivating factor for getting into the kid-saving business. Canada devised a conveyor belt from preschool through elementary and middle schools in Promise Academy, offering enrichment programs for children and parents to compensate for their disadvantages compared to middle-class families. Tough focuses on individual families and staff to tell a compelling story of a neighborhood fighting mightily to provide its children with the educational benefits of more well-to-do communities. Tough also views Harlem Children's Zone in the broader context of raging debate among academics and economists from James Heckman to Glen Loury regarding causes and cures of urban poverty and low school performance. This is an engrossing look at a visionary man and a bold experiment that has caught the eye of a wide range of politicians, including presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has promised to replicate the program throughout the U.S. if elected.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN assessing the state of America's children, people speak of the achievement gap between the middle class and the poor. But really there's an everything gap: a health gap, a safety gap, a technology gap, a conversational gap, a "turning off the TV and going to the library" gap. Schools can help make up for some of these deficits, but they can't make up all the difference. This is where Geoffrey Canada comes in. Canada, if you haven't heard of him already, is the man behind the Harlem Children's Zone Project, a hugely ambitious effort to improve lives in a 97-block swath of New York City. Others, like Marian Wright Edelman or Wendy Kopp, have worked as tirelessly on behalf of America's children. But the Harlem Children's Zone, founded in 1997, is perhaps the most intensive set of youth programs of our time. As Paul Tough explains in "Whatever It Takes," Canada "believed that he could find the ideal intervention for each age of a child's life, and then connect those interventions into an unbroken chain of support." Its "conveyor belt" begins when expectant parents learn about safety gates and mothers of toddlers learn to turn supermarkets into learning labs. Prekindergartners were enrolled for 10 hours a day, with an intensive focus on language, including French vocabulary. Canada's high school, middle school and two elementary schools - all charters - can't educate all the children in the zone; those left out can still attend computer workshops, fitness classes or college prep. Canada isn't satisfied with propelling selected children to a better life; his goal is to "contaminate" the entire culture of Harlem with aspirational values, disciplined self-improvement and the cognitive tools to do better than those who came before. That depends on offering services to as many people as possible. Employees approach teenagers with strollers and stake out Laundromats. "Whatever It Takes" is engaged throughout, nowhere more so than in a vivid section on Baby College. Tough's account of this parenting class illustrates the challenges Canada and his staff face. Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton have sung Canada's praises, Barack Obama has promised to replicate the zone in 20 cities, Wall Street backers have helped boost its budget to more than $40 million a year. But superstar fans go only so far when it comes to teaching the value of time-outs to an expectant father whose discipline philosophy is based on pinching. Poor people typically don't view their children as improvement projects the way middle-class parents do, and Tough presents the social science that shows how this can leave their children at an almost insurmountable disadvantage. Telling poor people how to raise their children is sometimes denounced as racism or "cultural imperialism," but Canada sees attentive, careful parenting - of the type middle-class parents read about in baby books - as the first step toward overcoming poverty. As he puts it, "We want our parents to have the same information the rest of America has." Canada, 56, has lived the arc he would like to see his charges travel. He grew up poor, with an absent father. Through a combination of pluck, luck, strong relatives and affirmative action, Canada got himself out of the South Bronx and through elite colleges. He was rarely around for his first son, born while he was a sophomore at Bowdoin; when the second arrived, much later, he talked to him in the womb and played him Mozart. At Baby College, "graduation" is celebrated with balloons, a processional and speeches. The other graduation Tough describes, from a middle school called Promise Academy, is bittersweet, since disappointing test scores and behavior problems have caused Canada to retreat from plans to start a high school with these rising ninth graders. Tough, an editor at The New York Times Magazine who spent five years following Canada's project, shows the pressures facing administrators. Most of the sixth graders arrived reading at a third-grade level or worse and thinking that 53 was 15; meanwhile, backers were ready to clean house when they didn't see big improvements in test scores after just one year. While scores did eventually go up, Tough doesn't give much of an idea of what the students were learning or how they were taught, beyond the test-prep they were given morning, noon and night. At a time when social service organizations struggle to show quantifiable results, it's never clear, beyond the force of Canada's personality, how he managed to attract so much support without the evidence funders typically demand. Still, when it comes to an introduction to the debate about poverty and parenting in urban America, you could hardly do better than Tough's book. The children of the uneducated and impoverished too often bear a gloomy inheritance, their futures set in stone from an early age. Within Canada's 97 blocks, Tough finds a different kind of legacy one shaped by parents who have learned to pay attention to their children's developmental needs. With a support network unlike anything else in America, the children of Harlem can envision a future so many others expect as a matter of course. Geoffrey Canada wants to 'contaminate' the culture of Harlem with aspirational values. Linda Perlstein, the public editor of the National Education Writers Association, is the author of "Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade."
Kirkus Review
New York Times Magazine editor Tough profiles an ambitious effort to simultaneously address the seemingly eternal societal problems of poverty, class stratification, educational underachievement and racial discrimination. Frustrated by the limited number of people he could help in his job at a nonprofit organization providing services for at-risk youth, Geoffrey Canada in 1999 founded a large-scale initiative eventually dubbed the Harlem Children's Zone. He believed that to truly make a difference in a disadvantaged community, he must provide comprehensive services to residents from birth (or earlier) until death. With money raised privately as well as from government entities, Canada formulated programs providing prenatal care, instruction in parenting skills, early childhood education, K-12 schooling and help with the college-application process. The breadth and depth of his vision was either breathtaking or breathtakingly impractical, depending on your point of view. The author, though obviously an admirer, delineates the problems with Canada's program theory and its implementation as well as the strengths. While doing so, he moves seamlessly among three areas, situating accounts of Canada's life and policies within the larger context of previous movements to alleviate the consequences of poverty, class and race. Tough shows even the most na™ve reader how difficult it is to grapple with the question of how to take an entire community of mostly disadvantaged children and mostly undereducated parents without financial resources and transform them--or at least the children as they grow--into fully functioning members of the middle class. To the extent that Canada is succeeding, the author attributes a portion of the victory to his ability to appeal to donors and volunteers across the political spectrum. Neither Democrats nor Republicans nor independents can articulate sound reasons to oppose this visionary socioeconomic experiment. Outstanding literary nonfiction, distinguished by in-depth reporting, compelling writing and deep thinking. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
New York Times Magazine editor Tough on activist Canada's biggest project to date: a multimillion-dollar organization called the Harlem Children's Zone that serves 7000 -youngsters. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
1 The Lottery | p. 1 |
2 Unequal Childhoods | p. 21 |
3 Baby College | p. 53 |
4 Contamination | p. 98 |
5 Battle Mode | p. 126 |
6 Bad Apples | p. 155 |
7 Last Chance | p. 174 |
8 The Conveyor Belt | p. 188 |
9 Escape Velocity | p. 213 |
10 Graduation | p. 234 |
11 What Would It Take? | p. 257 |
Acknowledgments | p. 271 |
Notes | p. 276 |
Index | p. 286 |