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Harlem Children’s Zone CEO Geoffrey Canada announced this weekend that he’s launching a new nonprofit, Learn NY, to support mayoral control of the public schools.

Canada is toeing the Bloomberg administration line pretty close in this battle. But he does of course have a mind of his own — and sometimes his ideas are unconventional.

Last week at the Campaign for Educational Equity symposium at Teachers College, Canada semi-jokingly proposed a redistribution scheme for teachers. “All the lousy teachers, we should send to the upper-middle-class communities,” he said. “In those communities a kid could have a lousy teacher and still survive.” (more…)

Geoffrey Canada (via Flickr)

Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada has been a big supporter of Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg’s education initiatives. So I was surprised yesterday to hear Canada criticize the kind of focused attention on test scores that has characterized their leadership.

The education world’s focus on basic academic results could put valuable programs at risk as the economy sours, Canada warned yesterday during a conference hosted by TC’s Campaign for Educational Equity.

He said he worries that the recession will hit poor communities such as Harlem the hardest, as government and private funders slash budgets for education and other services.

Canada said that distress could be compounded by the education world’s fixation with math and reading performance because other subjects could get short shrift when funds are scarce.

“Unfortunately, so much of the discussion is around academic outcomes that people are going to make some false choices,” Canada said. “We are going to create a hole that we are not going to be able to dig ourselves out of.” (more…)

As the economy erodes, so too might the philanthropic investments made by wealthy corporations in communities and schools. From an article in today’s Times about the impact of the financial downturn on Harlem:

“People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don’t understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street,” said Geoffrey Canada, president and chief executive of Harlem Children’s Zone, one of the neighborhood’s largest private, nonprofit groups. “Their absence leaves us scrambling to replace what has been a significant amount of support.” …

Among [HCZ's] contributors have been A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers, which had pledged $3 million before its collapse last month. The status of the Lehman aid is unclear, but Mr. Canada, the nonprofit group’s president, said he might need to cut back.

Also in jeopardy, according to the article, are the famed Apollo Theater’s education programs, underwritten by the now defunct Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Washington Mutual; an after-school squash and tutoring program launched by Bear Stearns, which this spring was the first firm to fail; and CityLAX, whose board, stacked with finance workers, recently brought lacrosse to several schools for the first time as an official sport.

Paul Tough and others knowledgeable about urban education have been discussing his book, Whatever It Takes, at Talking Points Memo’s TPM Cafe this week. Tough’s book chronicles the life of Geoffrey Canada and the creation of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which brings together a number of programs to help children growing up in poverty. Unlike schools, which usually don’t work with children until they are 4 or 5 years old, the HCZ approach starts even before children are born, with a parenting program called “Baby College.”

TPM Cafe invited the Education Trust’s Amy Wilkins, Teach For America’s Kira Orange-Jones, the Education Sector’s Andy Rotherham, and Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America to respond to Tough’s book. The conversation started with a look at how the HCZ approach fits into the two education platforms battling for candidates’ attention this summer, the Broader, Bolder Approach and Education Equality Project (click either for a refresher).

Alex Kotlowitz pointed out that poor families need both, to which Rotherham replied (and Amy Wilkins agreed) that it’s really a question of where to begin:

All else equal we can expect a great deal more from our public schools than they’re delivering today. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do more on the other issues that affect achievement, but that in the meantime educators should seek to do more today in the realm they directly control – the schools.

Tough responded that what makes the most sense is doing all of the above, simultaneously: a spectrum of early-childhood interventions plus more accountability for schools. But he acknowledged that one side of that equation is easier to push for than the other, which brings me back to an earlier question. If it’s common sense to work on closing the achievement gap from all angles, how do we make sure that happens? (Rotherham and Tough think Barack Obama might be the answer — but what about in the long-term, beyond any individual political leader?)

Courtesy of Harlem Children's Zone

Barack Obama may not have come out explicitly for the “Broader, Bolder Approach,” but his education and social policies suggest that’s where his allegiance lies, writes Paul Tough in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

Obama has sworn to create 20 “Promise Neighborhoods” in the model of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides comprehensive social services for children living in 97 square blocks in Harlem. His rationale: “If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can’t just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal the entire community.” In these neighborhoods, families will have access to parenting training, free prekindergarten programs, charter schools, counseling, after-school programs, and high-quality health care.

These neighborhoods would necessarily be home to the “total schools” I wrote about last month — and would provide a major step toward Kelly’s vision of “a no excuses society.” The big question, Tough writes, is whether Obama, if elected, can summon the political will to commit the “few billion dollars a year” creating these full-service zones would require.