Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America

Where to buy Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America books online?

• ISBN13: 9780547247960
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description

That was the question that Geoffrey Canada establish 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 huge numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to make the Harlem Children’s Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is hard new and sometimes controversial thoughts 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, regularly against fantastic odds. Carefully researched and deeply distressing, this is a send off from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social conduct experiment of our time.

About the Leader
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 take in tale. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Questions for Paul Tough

Amazon.com: What makes Geoffrey Canada’s approach to educating poor city kids different than the many reforms that have come before?

Tough: Geoff is taking a much more comprehensive approach than earlier reformers. His premise is that kids in neighborhoods like Harlem face so many disadvantages–poorly run schools, poorly educated parents, treacherous streets–that it doesn’t make sense to tackle just one or two of persons problems and snub the rest. And so he has made, in the Harlem Children’s Zone, an integrated set of programs that support the neighborhood’s children from cradle to college, in school and out of school.

Amazon.com: This is a fleeting book about a long tale. How did you find a way to tell the tale of such a intricate, long-term transformation?

Tough: When I set out to write this book, my main goal was to tell an engaging tale, to find characters and moments and conflicts that would reflect the changes that were going on in Harlem. I wanted to present Geoff Canada more as a protagonist in a drama than as a static theme of a biography. And in that respect, I got lucky in my choice of theme, because during the years I spent reporting on his work, Geoff was in the middle of some major transformations, both personal and organizational. I was also lucky to find a variety of additional characters in Harlem, from teachers and administrators to students and parents, who really opened up to me, language candidly and eloquently about their own hopes and fears for their children and their futures. With their help, I reflect I was able to make the book not just an account of some vital new thoughts in poverty and education, but a human tale as well.

Amazon.com: You’ve spent much of the past five years reporting in Harlem. Beyond the school successes, do you see differences between the parts of the city within the Children’s Zone and nearby neighborhoods where the program hasn’t expanded yet?

Tough: Harlem as a whole has improved a fantastic deal over the last decade–a process that Geoffrey Canada can take some credit for, though there were plenty of additional people and forces that played a role. On a block-by-block level, though, it’s not permanently possible to see the difference between a street that is in the zone and one that’s outside of it. The most vital changes in the zone are going on out of view, inside schools and apartments and housing projects, where children are, for the first time, learning the skills they need to make it.

Amazon.com: Barack Obama has said that he would replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 additional cities. Have any additional organizations begun to follow Canada’s model in additional places, or are they waiting to see how it goes (or waiting for Obama to be elected)?

Tough: There is a tremendous amount of interest right now in Geoffrey Canada’s work among people effective in education and philanthropy and social-service non-profits. And there are fledgling zone projects in a handful of cities, all drawing upon the Harlem Children’s Zone to some degree. But there’s nothing yet happening on the scale that Obama has proposed. I do reflect people are waiting to see what Obama does. Will he take the steps necessary to place his replication plot into effect?

Amazon.com: How much of its effectiveness depends on Canada himself? Can you model him, as well as his program?

Tough: He’s a unique guy. His personal tale–born in poverty in the South Bronx, growing up around drugs and violence, then building it out of the ghetto and winding up at Harvard–was what gave him the passion and the commitment to make the Harlem Children’s Zone in the face of copious obstacles and widespread skepticism. So it’s probably right that no one else could have built the first zone. But I reflect this next stage, the process of expanding the zone model around the country, will require leaders of a different type–people who are passionate about the mission of improving the lives of poor children, of course, but more importantly people who are very all ears on results and how to achieve them. Persons people may be rare, but they’re out there.

Amazon.com: Finally, how are Champion and Cheryl [a young couple who went through the Zone's Baby College in the book] doing?

Tough: They’re doing pretty well! They’re still struggling with all the issues that most young adults in Harlem struggle with, like finding affordable housing and a decent job. But they’re committed to their son, Champion Jr., and to the new parenting techniques they learned in Baby College. They’re determined to do whatever it takes to give Champion Jr. a shot at a very different kind of future than they were able to imagine for themselves, growing up.

Questions for Geoffrey Canada

Amazon.com: How do you change the culture of a neighborhood while keeping its local values?

Canada: We are not changing Harlem’s culture–we are effective to provide an alternative to the toxic well loved culture and street culture that elevate violence and anti-social behavior. When you are a frightened kid, all this tough-guy stuff is very seductive. We are effective with people from the community to provide safe, enriching, and engaging environments for children so they can renovate just like their middle-class peers. By encompassing an entire neighborhood, we hope to reach a tipping point where the dominant culture is one that explicitly and implicitly moves children toward success.

Amazon.com: You say in the book, “It is my fundamental belief that the folk who care about public education the most, who really want to see it work, are destroying it.” Can you clarify what you mean by that? Have you been able to change any of persons minds through your work?

Canada: First, let me say that I judge school staff–particularly teachers–perform one of the most vital jobs in our country, and many of them are the most dedicated, hard-effective professionals I know. I judge it is absolutely scandalous that they are not paid more and agreed more respect as professionals. That said, I judge our country’s education bureaucracy has become calcified and resistant to change–and we are in dire need of change. When education self-interest groups defend practices that get in the way of improving schools for the sake of children, then I am absolutely opposed to them.

I judge that the successes we are having in Harlem are beginning to turn some heads in this country, and building people realize that things are not hopeless–that we adults can improve student achievement at a much-larger scale than we have been doing. It’s obvious that the system that got us here is not the one that is going to get us out. So everyone is going to have to re-evaluate their roles, their assumptions and their positions. I reflect that has begun, but we are not there yet as a country.

Amazon.com: The tale in the book ends in the summer of 2007. What has happened in your work, especially at Promise College, in the past year?

Canada: This past literary year was very encouraging and it really seemed like the school started to coalesce. The most obvious sign of that were the scores on the citywide math exam at our middle school, which had been the school with the most challenges. This past spring, 97 percent of the eighth graders were at or above grade level. For an area like Harlem, that is incredible, particularly since these were kids that were randomly selected by lottery from the neighborhood, were massively behind, and were with us for just three years. So we are very optimistic about the future of our kids.

Buy Cheap Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America Online

Related posts:

1. Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions
2. The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
3. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
4. 1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die
5. What It Takes To Be Number #1: Vince Lombardi on Leadership