Paul Tough, a former staff editor at The New York Times Magazine, has a lengthy op-ed piece in today's Times titled ?Don't Drop Out of School Innovation,? in which he grumbles about the proposed cuts to Obama's Promise Neighborhoods initiative. The President wanted $210 million to ?help create,? as Tough (pronounced Tuff) writes, ?in 20 cities across the country a new kind of support system for disadvantaged children.? A Senate subcommittee wants to slice the program ?by more than 90 percent,? says Tough, because Geoffrey Canada's ambitious Harlem Children's Zone project, on which the Promise Neighborhood proposal is modeled, ?has not yet proved itself.?
The Tough argument is interesting and ? for anyone who has met or seen or heard Geoffrey Canada ? compelling. (See also Andy Smarick's ?Ode to Joy.?) But it's also flawed. Unfortunately, so.
I met Tough last year while he was signing copies of his book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, at a table near the ballroom of the posh New York Sheraton in midtown Manhattan, then buzzing with hundreds of HCZ groupies and well-healed (and -heeled)?corporate sponsors. (Having been to many such events at this hotel, I was quite impressed by the fact that this one was organized by and for African-Americans and featured an impressive array of black-run businesses and organizations, including HCZ itself. (American Express, a huge sponsor of HCZ, in case you've missed the TV commercials, is run?by Kenneth Chenault, a black man.) Equally striking were?the number of high-level?presidential administration appointees, also black, who were there. The event was an impressive mix of school reformers and community activists from all over the country ? white and black ? and was meant to jump-start the Promise Neighborhoods initiative.
I admit to taking a few hours off and grabbing a subway to Harlem to visit with Eva Moskowitz, the former NYC Councilmember, scourge of the teacher unions and now the successful leader of Harlem Success Academy. Plenty has been written about Moskowitz (see Ode to Joy above), but my experience of the visit was much like that of Steven Brill, who wrote about his trip to Harlem in the Times Magazine last May:
A building on 118th Street is one reason that the parents? know that charters can work. On one side there's the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there's a regular public school, P.S. 149, with 438 pre-K to 8th-grade students. They are separated only by a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and cafeteria. School reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education ? the union, big-system bureaucracy and low expectations for disadvantaged children.
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But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149 is rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the city's schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall.
?
Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students.
The moral is this: a school is a school and a neighborhood is a neighborhood. And my problem with Tough's op-ed piece is not just that?he blurs the line, but he heads down a well-trodden path: gotta fix the neighorhoods before you fix the schools.
On the one hand, as the Brill piece brilliantly shows, I'm not so sure we don't know what works and doesn't work in education ? or, for that matter,??in education reform. Perhaps I am a rube about this, but when I walk into a school ? I took the same tour as Brill and it is as startling as he describes it ? I know within a few minutes whether the place is working for the kids or not. (It's a little like the Supreme Court rule on pornography: you know when you see it.) I will soon be trademarking Pete's Palm Card for Education Excellence: Order. Consistency. Content.
When researching a story for Education Next on Catholic Schools ? now, that's a school system that has ?worked? for many generations, including especially for the poor ? I was quite impressed with a remark my friend Bobby McDonald made as we stood outside our failing local public school: ?Nothing wrong with this place that a busload of nuns couldn't fix.? (The nuns represent a model of what works, as Anthony Bryk and his colleagues showed in their now classic, Catholic Schools and the Common Good.) And for an Ed Next story on Tom Carroll's amazingly successful charter school network in Albany, NY, Brighter Choice, then educating nearly 20% of Albany's poorest public school children (who were trouncing their richer, whiter colleagues on test scores), I recall asking Carroll (full disclosure: I am currently working on a book for his Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability), ?So how come you can do it and they (Albany Public Schools) can't?? and he said, ?Political will.?
Tough himself, in the op-ed essay, admits that charter schools in and near HCZ have registered ?impressive results? and he rightly credits Joel Klein and KIPP and other charter innovators?for their successes. But Tough then argues that ?despite their robust test scores, there continue to be debates over whether these charter schools work for the most disadvantaged children in neighborhoods like Harlem, and no one has yet demonstrated whether the KIPP model could succeed at the scale of an entire school system.?
Uh?
We're supposed to applaud innovative programs that work on local levels (all over the country), but be skeptical of them because they haven't proven themselves scalable? At the same time, we're supposed to spend millions of bucks scaling up a project that hasn't proven itself on even a local level?
Clearly, the federal government is not known for its precision with regard to the efficient use of funds ? how many highways to nowhere and Great Societies have we built? ? but I wish Tough had split hairs on this one differently.
Promise Neighborhoods are Promise Neighborhoods; they are not schools. And KIPP schools are schools, not neighborhoods. The latter has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you can educate poor children and close the achievement gap, without rehabbing the neighborhood or saving parents. (At a conference of inner city neighborhood reformers I attended several years ago, a longtime housing development specialist admitted to me, with a shrug, ?After doing this for years, I now realize that before you begin to fix the neighborhoods or build new housing, you have to fix the schools.?)
Let's give Geoffrey Canada a huge round of applause and maybe even give Promise Neighborhoods their $210 million. He is the real deal; and $210 is chump change for the feds. But let's please understand that there are large and significant differences between good neighborhood and good schools; that fixing neighborhoods does not magically bring you good schools, but that fixing schools does, eventually, get you good neighborhoods ? and a whole lot more.
?Peter Meyer
