In the Zone with Geoffrey Canada
RSSBy Lauren Barack
How did your involvement in the documentary come about? I was in Los Angeles helping to raise money for the Children's Defense Fund, of which I am president and CEO. And I met Davis Guggenheim who said he wanted me to be in the movie. He wanted to do for poor children failing in school what he had done for the environment, which was to create a debate and possibly bring about change. I was intrigued. Now everywhere I go people are talking about education, and this movie is a clear reference point. Has the movie brought about change? There's not a doubt that we're going to have change. The two issues that were highlighted in the movie, the Rubber Room in New York and what was happening in Washington, D.C. were both resolved before the movie even came out. There are real reform efforts going on because, in part, of Race to the Top, which has pushed real reform that never would have been done otherwise. And there are real experiments going in Houston, Denver, and places in Connecticut. The public appetite for education reform is going to last at least as long as this recession. In my opinion, as we began as a nation to struggle as to where and how to employ our citizens, we saw the glaring deficiencies in our work force as they simply don't have the skill levels for new jobs being created. To the degree we worry about high-unemployment, that will be tied to understanding that we are failing America's kids. It used to happen with education reform, you'd have one month of conversation and then everything returned to normal. I don't see that with this issue now. You refer to students in the documentary as seeing the world as a "cold, heartless place" by middle school, especially if they've been disenfranchised by the educational system. Do you believe young people are aware they're missing an education? It's really clear to me that by middle school there are groups of students who recognize that any hope they had by then for a better life through education has been shattered. They don't know why, but they realize that if you don't have an education and can't get a decent job, not only are you not going to make it, but also nobody cares. They see the signs all around them, of people whose lives have fallen apart and people walking by them, unseeing and unknowing. It is the life of the poor in an inner city. This sense of young people realizing it's a cold, heartless place is really tied to that face. Everybody recognizes the earlier you intervene the better. But at Harlem Children's Zone we never give up on kids no matter their age. What it means, in my opinion, is the odds decrease as they get older. You're not going to get a kid in the 11th grade into a great college if they're reading four levels below grade level. They'll get into a college, probably a community college, but not a great college, and so you have to intervene as soon as possible. If you were appointed New York City Schools Chancellor, what would be your first act? I would come up with a blueprint of how we were going to improve student performance. The reality of the test we're giving students is that it's going to be even more difficult this year. That means tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of students receiving scores that indicate they're in real trouble. And so I think that's job one. Determining a plan. I know a lot of people are upset by the focus on high stakes testing. But it's my belief that we're making a good faith attempt to interpret what skills our young people need by a certain age if they're going to progress towards becoming successful adults, enter college, and be prepared for college. I think we have to have measurements to know if we're moving in the right direction or not. Having said that, we have to make sure we get the test right, we also have to make sure the education is right. Moving up the standards while having schools operate in this way doesn't make a lot of sense. So how would you change the way schools are operated? There are three things I am pushing. We really need to focus on getting quality teachers and removing lousy teachers. We also need a longer school year. How can you accelerate poor kids who are behind? The only way to do that is to have more time. There's absolutely no reason to have our schools close for ten weeks every summer. It serves no one. At Harlem Children's Zone we go through the first week of August. And I really believe that our nation must embrace a much more rigorous academic set of standards. Do libraries play a role? The libraries have to be key in this. We just have to make sure that we come up with the best state of the art strategic campaigns to grab ahold of our young people's attention and focus, otherwise the video games and telephones will remain the dominant way our young people will entertain themselves and learn. And I'm not sure that will help with our workforce. How do school librarians fit into all this? They have one of the most critical roles in schools. And it's because things are changing so rapidly with how young people get information, view and use that information. Teachers and principals and people like myself will never keep up with the changes. And we have to have librarians and media specialists not only up to speed with what's going on with new developments, but also how to link back to educators. Librarians not only teach students how to consume information and entertainment, but also help professionals learn how to use media and books more effectively. We have never had a more competitive environment for our young people's attention, and if we only offer the tools that have been around for the past 50 years, I feel like we're going to lose a lot of young people. So the question is how can books be combined with new media to capture our young people's attention? Tell us about the technology at Harlem Children's Zone? We have SmartBoards in all the classrooms so if you're teaching something about Antarctica, and you read something you can also put something on the board for the kids to view and then switch right back over to math, for example. I think in our library, with our librarian, we are focusing on alternative kinds of information from books. So young people begin to learn about opportunities and also limitations about the information that's online. We're also thinking about how we can one day tie the sense of community, which our young people are looking for online, to our schools. Because this is not going to change. The Internet is a reality for many of our young people, as an experience. Young people have Facebook friends that they have never met, which I don't understand, but they really consider them friends. So those of us in education have to think about how we see the idea of community within education. What's next for Harlem Children's Zone and for you? I just had one of my books, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence (Beacon Press, 1995), re-released as a graphic novel (Beacon Press, 2010). It's really a history of violence and how it's changed from fistfights to handguns in many communities. And those issues have not changed. It's primarily read by adults, but the issue needs to be understood more by children because they're the ones who live in communities where guns are used to settle disputes. So I teamed up with a young graphic illustrator, Jamar Nicholas, and we made the book more consumable for young audiences. That came out in September. Has Waiting for Superman changed anything for you? Because of the movie, more people are trying to get into the school, but we're only taking them at three-years-old because we're trying to intervene early, and because we are not going to expand. That's intentional. I've always believed charter schools should be engines of innovation. But we decided not to expand, and instead look for ways to improve the area of public education for all students. We're looking to do an elementary school with one of our public schools in the zone that has many of the characteristics of our charter school, but we'll work in a longer school day, and a longer school year. We can't say we've done a deal, but we're trying. That's the next area for us, continue to improve our own program, but try to have that in larger school areas. This article originally appeared in the newsletter Extra Helping. Go here to subscribe. Last time Mr. Canada had a school librarian job posted, the stated pay was
$20,000 less than the minimum a certified LMS would make in a district
public school.
Mr. Canada pays himself just about double (~$500,000) what the
chancellor of NYC's 1000+ public schools makes. * = Required information
Geoffrey Canada, CEO of New York's Harlem Children's Zone has helped shape a new direction in education with his celebrated school and prominent role in Davis Guggenheim's moving documentary Waiting for Superman (2010). We caught up with Canada to discuss his thoughts on the failures of public education and how he hopes to change that outcome one student at a time.
Reader Comments (1)
Posted by BT on December 13, 2010 08:30:15PM
