“Hope or Hype in Harlem?”
Knowing nothing but the zillion things I have read, and setting aside that the charter schools themselves are somewhat of a mystery to me, I think the Harlem Children’s Zone is all sorts of awesome. But I have always thought it intriguing how Geoffrey Canada managed to receive so much support (money, praise, etc.) from the type of people who usually insist on seeing results before they proclaim something a success. This has been probably the most written-about single endeavor for children in decades, yet we had not seen a truly thorough look into the two key questions that should be asked about HCZ: Does it work, and can it be copied?
Too early to draw firm conclusions, but now we at least have a start. Helen Zelon at CityLimits.org has reported and written a thorough and very interesting piece about Canada and the Zone, focusing on those two questions. To the first, there is no conclusive answer—Canada himself says they have such a long time horizon for judging success, decades, because the arc of the effort runs from infancy to college. Then why, as Zelon points out, does the HCZ not track students who left the program’s charter schools for public high schools outside the Zone, because the charter part of the pipeline was ending? “We don’t evaluate them in the sense we evaluate our own kids,” an official said. What a mistake. Isn’t the point of the pipeline that they are your “own kids” till they go to college, and wouldn’t you track them even beyond, if you are as results-oriented as you say?
The article leaves me with other questions. Zelon writes, “According to Canada’s tipping point theory, once Harlem reaches a 65 percent level of success—academic, economic,
Too early to draw firm conclusions, but now we at least have a start. Helen Zelon at CityLimits.org has reported and written a thorough and very interesting piece about Canada and the Zone, focusing on those two questions. To the first, there is no conclusive answer—Canada himself says they have such a long time horizon for judging success, decades, because the arc of the effort runs from infancy to college. Then why, as Zelon points out, does the HCZ not track students who left the program’s charter schools for public high schools outside the Zone, because the charter part of the pipeline was ending? “We don’t evaluate them in the sense we evaluate our own kids,” an official said. What a mistake. Isn’t the point of the pipeline that they are your “own kids” till they go to college, and wouldn’t you track them even beyond, if you are as results-oriented as you say?
The article leaves me with other questions. Zelon writes, “According to Canada’s tipping point theory, once Harlem reaches a 65 percent level of success—academic, economic,