News
To unlock millions of children's lives, we must look to the Harlem miracle
6 Aug 2009
President Obama believes he has found the answer to preventing poor children from being fatally handicapped by their backgrounds, The Guardian reports. Harlem Children's Zone, HCZ, is a unique project inspiring great discussion and governmental enthusiasm.
Geoffrey Canada's non-profit project has created a web of programmes that begin before birth and end with college and graduation. The goal: to change the achievements and expectations of every one of the 10,000 children living in 97 blocks of one of the most devastated communities in America.
The organisation works on the premise that change can only be guaranteed by raising the expectations of the whole community simultaneously, as "for children to do well, their families have to do well. And for families to do well, their community must do well." That is why HCZ works to strengthen families as well as empowering them to have a positive impact on their children's development.
Canada noted startling discrepancies between poor children and middle-class children in Harlem schools. Poor children, for instance, were arriving at school with an average of 25 hours of one-to-one reading behind them while middle-class children had 1,700 hours and their vocabularies were twice as large. Above all, middle-class children arrived with confidence to school because they had been encouraged. Poor children had been reprimanded two-and-a-half times more than they had been praised. Current research about the human the brain has uncovered that much of a child's capacity to think and to learn is set in the first three years of life. To make a lasting impact, then, Canada would have to change the way Harlem's children were being raised.
The "conveyor belt" of programmes from the HCZ begins with Baby College, a 9-week prenatal and early childhood parenting class with sections on brain development, discipline and parent-child bonding. The next step, for three-year-olds, is the Children's Zone pre-school, then the Promise Academy, one of the well-funded, successful charter schools that are the centrepiece of Canada's efforts. The cost is about $5,000 per child.
Current stats reflect the project's amazing impact on Harlem's children. Some 97% of eighth-graders at the Promise Academies are performing at or above grade level, for instance. The elementary school has closed the racial gap in language and in maths, and the pre-kindergarten children are outperforming their white counterparts. "We are trying to get enough kids in college so that you end intergenerational poverty, and we are well on the way to doing that," Canada said. The impact will be clear, he said. "We will see the impact five or six years from now, when these are working adults and no longer going to prison."
The Obama administration seeks to replicate the project's model in 20 cities in a programme called Promise Neighbourhoods and has set aside $10m in the 2010 budget for planning.
The Guardian's Jenni Russell reminds us that with continuity the impact will be long lasting. She said: What the Harlem experiment tells us is that our piecemeal approaches are never going to deliver real change for those at the bottom. The HCZ is starting where it matters, with the plasticity of babies' brains, and it is trying to recreate, in homes and in the community, what prosperous children already get: sustained care and concern over a lifetime.
(The Guardian, 6 August 2009)
