The Harlem Miracle
Brooks touts "the Harlem miracle," of enormous gains by student's in the Zone's Promise Academies. He cites an achievement that few, if any, other programs can claim: "In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the [New York] city average for white students." Harvard economist Roland Fryer explains that this is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.” There's no question. Something is going tremendously right in the Harlem Children's Zone.
The Cause of Change
In order to replicate the model, you have to understand what is going on in the Zone. David Brooks explains that the schools provide the order, rigor and discipline that students' home environments lack. In short, "The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values." And they get results. But is that the whole story?
Baby College
What David Brooks didn't highlight is what his colleague at the New York Times, Paul Tough, calls the essential element of the Harlem Children's Zone: The Baby College. This parent-engagement arm of the Zone sends outreach workers throughout the community to invite expectant parents and parents of children birth to age 3 to a nine-week parenting workshop (and lures them with the promise of $100 upon completion of the term). Tough explains the approach in Whatever it Takes:
"Geoffrey Canada, for his part, understands why so many social scientists and black activists are reluctant to identify parenting as a cause of the racial achievement gap. But in Harlem, he believes, the simple reality is that most of the neighborhood's poor, black parents are not adequately preparing their infants and children to be educated. And to him, the practical advantages of addressing that fact overshadow the political costs." (p104)Canada isn't blaming parents. He's calling a spade a spade; and he's helping parents. The students that Canada is enrolling into his pre-kindergarten come from families that have participated in The Baby College and the Three Year Journey (the second-step parenting workshop series). The pre-kindergarten graduates arrive in the Promise Academy kindergarten ready to learn - not solely because of a great pre-kindergarten program, but because the Zone engages, equips, and inspires parents to play their critical role in education. Geoffrey Canada is an innovator not because he holds kids to high standards (there are plenty of other folks doing that), but because he empowers the most influential stakeholders in education - the parents - years before students walk the halls of one of the Promise Academy, sometimes before those children are even born.
The Unanswered Question
David Brooks concludes his op-ed with a call to arms:
The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap.We may have found the remedy for the achievement gap, but a massive question remains unanswered: Why do traditional, middle-class values deserve "ferocious commitment"? From whence did these "middle-class values" arise? Is the story that they tell authentic? Is it comprehensive? And is it satisfying? We would do well to listen to Lesslie Newbigin:
The conscience that is required to keep capitalism going has no ontological basis. It is a fragment, a broken piece left over from the destruction of the older view [traditional values, rooted in Christian assumptions about the world], preserved for the purpose of keeping the new system going. But moral imperatives only retain their power as part of a living system of belief, some vision of what is the case. Moral imperatives cannot be hired to prop up a wholly different set of values.Our children, if they are good students, will eventually ask the question: Why should I adopt your traditional, middle-class values? Unless we have answers better than parents in the 1960s, we shouldn't expect better results.
