Geoffrey Canada's Harlem schools to be replicated around country...200 million of public money.

[madfloridian]

Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children's Zone are getting federal funds to replicate their schools around the country.

'Harlem Children's Zone' To Be Replicated Across The Country

In 1997, Geoffrey Canada founded Harlem Children's Zone, a comprehensive system of programs and charter schools designed to help Harlem children succeed. Children enter the program as infants and graduate college-bound. In just over 10 years, Canada revolutionized a broken education system in a community where poverty and drop out rates ran high.

The program's incredible success has made Canada one of the nation's leading advocates in education reform. Canada is profiled in Davis Guggenheim's education documentary, "Waiting For 'Superman.' "

Now, the federal government has announced Canada's program will be reproduced in 20 communities across America.

President Obama has requested $200 million in his fiscal 2011 budget to help implement the 21 projects that are being planned this year, along with $10 million for additional planning grants.

I still have great concerns about mixing federal taxpayer money with private enterprises in our education system.

One group in NY is planning to protest the construction of a new Harlem Children's Zone school in their neighborhood. They say it would do harm to the area by getting rid of green spaces and opening up their street to more traffic.

Residents' Group Fights Plan to Build Charter School


William Danzy and Sandra Thomas stand near some of the open space that will be lost if the Harlem Children's Zone new charter school is constructed on the site.

HARLEM— A plan by the Harlem Children's Zone and the New York City Housing Authority to build a charter school on open space at the St Nicholas Houses has sparked opposition from some residents.

Under the current proposal, 93,000 square feet of open space at St. Nicholas Houses, between West 127th and West 131st streets and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass boulevards, would be sold to build a charter school for 1,300 students.

..."West 129th Street, which now ends in a cul-de-sac before Frederick Douglass Boulevard, would also be opened up to through traffic. Construction is slated to start this year.

"They are going to take away this park," Danzy, a retired MTA train operator who has lived in the St. Nicholas Houses for decades, said Friday as he stood in the middle of the complex. Children rode bicycles and people lounged on the benches until raindrops began to fall. "Look at all these people sitting and enjoying this park, yet they still consider it underutilized."

Here is a playground that will be demolished to make way for the Harlem charter schools.


One of the playgrounds that will be lost.

His schools were featured in Waiting for Superman. Money given to them is not being provided for public education, and that disturbs me.

[Schema Thing]

1. these kids are not the public?

[madfloridian]

2. Those playgrounds will have to go to make room for the schools

and so will the park.

[Frank Booth]

7. I may be crazy,

but I'd rather see the kids learning than playing in the playground.

[madfloridian]

8. Those kids go to school already.

You don't seem to understand that a privately run charter has permission to tear down their park and playground to build a school only a few will attend.

I really don't know how to say it more clearly.

[Frank Booth]

11. I guess I don't understand how giving poor kids the choice of attending a school

with a high record of achievement that is run by a non-profit organization provides less of a benefit than a playground.

[immoderate]

13. A false choice.

Anyway why should we suffer the existence of any patch of grass and trees in Manhattan? Manhattan was made to be paved, right?

--imm

[Frank Booth]

14. There aren't a lot of spots available in Manhattan for a 1300 student school.

Would I prefer they evict the residents from an upper west side coop and put the school there instead? Of course. But, unfortunately that's not going to happen.

[madfloridian]

15. Wow.

I don't even have a comment on that statement.

[Hannah Bell]

17. then maybe they shouldn't have one. or maybe they should pay market price instead of stealing

public property at a discount.

[immoderate]

18. This is the Wal-Martization of the school system.

--imm

[madfloridian]

4. I really don't understand your question?

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. k n r

[Pirate Smile]

5. He promised to do just this:

Replicate Harlem Children's Zone

"When I'm president, the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the country."
-- Washington, D.C.
JULY 18, 2007

Barack Obama

[madfloridian]

6. He also promised more charter schools.

I knew that but backed off from Hillary when she was using FL and MI as weapons to fight the DNC.

I think the Clintons approve of the reforms for schools, there really was not much difference.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Like Afghanistan he is doing what he promised

I don't like it... the train already left the station.

Twenty to twenty five years from now, at the earliest, we will ask what the hell did we do?

Or, we will be proven wrong. There will be NO MIDDLE GROUND on this.

[Hannah Bell]

10. the anti-democratic blitzkreig marches on.

[madfloridian]

16. There was a time we would have cared.

We fought eminent domain on many fronts when Bush was in power. Now when a privately run charter school gets to get rid of the vestiges of green in a city neighborhood we don't even bat an eye.

[madfloridian]

12. Only a few get to go to this charter school. But it gets public money.

That is my point. They can take neighborhoods and move in, and almost no way to fight them.

Here is a good blog post about how they work:

http://millermps.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/is-the-harlem-childrens-zone-all-its-made-out-to-be/

"The pipeline is a porous thing; it does not embrace all 17,000 people HCZ says it serves, nor the 8,000 children who participate in Zone programs. That’s because the pipeline narrows at a significant entry point — very early in a child’s life, at age 3 — when the school lottery separates the lucky children who secure a place in the Promise Academy schools from the less lucky rest.

HCZ’s Baby College — a 9-week parenting education program — enrolls hundreds of parents a year in multiple sessions at multiple locations. There’s no guarantee that kids whose parents attended Baby College will go to HCZ schools, especially as the Zone finds it tough to track and follow the parents who participate.

HCZ’s Harlem Gems preschool program admits 3-year-olds — ample time to prepare kids for school. So the kindergarten lottery was rolled back to age 3, when kids who gain a seat begin the rigorous, intensive HCZ education program, attending preschool 11 months a year for an extended day that can reach up to 10 hours. That’s where the Promise Academy pipeline starts.

After that point, access to the schools is limited and inconsistent. Even then, however, getting into a Zone school is no guarantee a kid will get to graduate from one. When the school first opened, they had lotteries for kindergarten and for middle school. But the kindergarten students were judged to be wildly under prepared (and the middle schoolers so rambunctious and difficult to wrangle) that HCZ closed the middle school — for two years. Funny how a charter can do that, say ‘oops’ and get a do-over. The students who were bounced out of the middle school after 8th grade graduation? HCZ doesn’t know what became of them –where they went to school, or how they’re doing. “They’re not our kids,” HCZ spokesman Marty Lipp told me* last fall, for an investigative report I wrote on the Zone for City Limits magazine. So much for that cradle-to-college pipeline."

When Bush wanted to mix public and private money, we said no.

Now we are saying yes. :shrug:

[BrklynLiberal]

36. Public money to fund private enterprises.. How much more Republican can one get??

The "profits" never accrue to the public that provided the funds...

[ipaint]

19. Obama is destroying public education this time so it's OK...

Just 5 short years ago.


Saving Public Education - Saving Democracy

E. Wayne Ross, Kathleen Kesson, David Gabbard, Sandra Mathison, & Kevin D. Vinson

...Though children today grow-up in a media-saturated world, we should not underestimate the potential of schools to help young people grow into adulthood with a discerning mind that will enable them to more critically evaluate the messages they receive from whatever news outlet. And yet, with so much media attention focused on the horrors of the Bush administration's "war on terror" and the surrounding scandals, the press - including progressive groups - has virtually ignored how the state and private power have colluded over the past twenty years to strip public schools of their democratizing potential. In the twenty-one years since the Reagan administration's National Commission for Excellence in Education released A Nation At Risk, no high-minded bastion of journalist integrity in the mainstream press has recanted its parroting reportage of the Commission's claims. Numerous books and professional articles have appeared in the interim to discredit those claims, but none of them have received any serious or sustained attention from the media. Neither has the media reported the miserable failure of educational privatization pioneers such as Christopher Whittle (CEO of the Edison Project) to rescue troubled schools through the wondrous powers of the business model of management.

The strongly bi-partisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) has similarly received no scrutiny that would alert the public to its insidious policy implications. In the first place, this legislation set ridiculously high standards that simply defied common sense. NCLB requires schools and teachers to insure that all students perform at or above grade level within a three year-period. This outrageous requirement includes children with learning disabilities and behavioral disorders no matter how profound. By definition, then - getting these kids to perform at grade level, NCLB holds teachers accountable for doing what medical science has never accomplished; namely, curing mental retardation.

NCLB also holds teachers accountable for bringing the performance of children from the most poverty-stricken homes up to grade level. While Rod Paige, Bush's homebred (former superintendent of Houston's public schools) Secretary of Education, chastises anyone who dares to criticize these "high expectations" and "rigorous standards" as "racists," one must pause to wonder when policy makers discovered their new faith in the remedial powers of schools. After all, the prison industry has long used third-grade reading scores to project how many new cells they will have to construct over the next twenty-year period.

While the policies of NCLB never receive any attention in the press, there has been some considerable recent outcry by Democrats and others because of the Bush administration's refusal to fund this legislation at its originally planned levels. No one stops; however, to examine the policies themselves, or to listen to teachers' complaints concerning how this high-stakes-testing model of school/teacher accountability pressures teachers to adopt the most intellectually stultifying (drill and kill) teaching methods that remove the joy of teaching from them and any potential joy of learning from their students.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/1/54338/81393


The destruction of public schools and the stealing of the public commons, both at the heart of a strong democracy, should be criminal but the blind authority worshiping in this country is astounding and serves the elites purposes to a tee.

I've never seen such a willingness to be herded unquestioningly by a dozen or so openly criminal vulture capitalist billionaires as they steal the most democratic institutions we possess.

What a fucking tragedy.

[DeltaLitProf]

20. Any school can be an excellent school . . .

. . . if you get to pick what students get to attend and if you get to send the ones home who act up.

[madfloridian]

21. Very true.

:hi:

[NYC_DEM]

22. I do not normally post however

My business often takes me to Harlem, Spanish Harlem, North
Harlem, in the early AM hours. If everyone posting in this
thread could see the level of depravity that exists - drugs,
prostitution, gangs, you name it its there and on the street
(at 630am). I could detail the depravity, pregnant moms doing
drugs on the stoop, whole blocks that you need to avoid
because they are "drug" blocks, gangs guarding their
territory with pit-bulls on chains, youths drinking beer on
stoops looking for trouble.  I don't know what eventually
locking all those people up in jail costs us as a
city/state/society but I am sure it is a massive expense - not
to mention the human cost both on the lost youth and their
victims. 

I have a really hard time being against ANY program that has
demonstrated success in giving even a small number of young
people in this area a way out. Irrespective of any larger
issue. 150 kids that go on to college every year from this one
school or whatever the number is - is far and away better than
almost any other outcome available to them given the area they
live in. My goodness many of the kids in these areas don't
even speak recognizable English the way things are currently;
even if only a handful make it out its a miracle given what
they face in terms of environment and probable lack of family
stability, never mind family supporting their education. 

There is a human cost to the status quo in Harlem, its
reprehensible that its come to this but it has. I am certainly
not pointing any fingers its wrong to expect teachers or their
union to fix all the city's ills, however if this
comprehensive program works I think its best to aid  them to
continue helping these kids. 


MK

[madfloridian]

24. Well, I have given my reasons for opposition. Over and over and over.

Geoffrey Canada blames only the teachers if the kids do not succeed. That is wrong. That is taking responsibility off the parents and children.

I have no objection to his program per se, in fact it has possibilities. But unless it is open to all children equally, then it should not be getting taxpayer money.

[Jefferson23]

23. Not one recommend for this information? Screw that, a big K&R for what should matter to all. n/t

[Hannah Bell]

25. it's gotten recs; mine for starters. just more from the deform crowd.

[Jefferson23]

26. That is a shame, this should not be about supporting Obama for the

sake of supporting him. The merits of this enterprise are bleak.

[JerseygirlCT]

27. I don't think I'd call a nonprofit "private enterprise"

Otherwise, I only know what I've seen about it and it seems a worthy undertaking, with some great results.

[madfloridian]

28. I refer to the fact it is publicly funded yet privately run.

Nearly every charter says they are non-profit...good lord everything is non-profit these days.

But if it is run privately, there should be great oversight if it gets public funds.

Geoffrey Canada says failure is not an option, and he only blames the teachers for failure. That should not be.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/sorry-geoffrey-canada-but-fail.html

Public schools will not be getting the 200 million allotted to his schools. And public schools don't get money from billionaires unless they do things their way.

[JerseygirlCT]

29. Well, first, they do have a board of directors

who are presumably community people - and have fiduciary responsibility for the organization. Second, if it gets public funds, it has to apply for those, yes? And I'd guess have to run the gauntlet of applications - which are usually full to the brim with all sorts of financial and organizational information. And of course, their tax returns are open to the public.

As I said, I'm not saying they're a well-run organization. I'm just saying that there is a very real difference between a private organization and a non-profit. Transparency is important for nonprofits in a way that it often isn't in private enterprise.

[madfloridian]

30. Millions of dollars are going to charter schools from the DOE this year.

That is money that is not going to go to public education.

Certain charters get more than others. But the 50 million going to Teach for America, another "non-profit" which indeed gets millions from school districts who hire their teachers who are new to teaching...that is more money not going to public education anymore.

If a country has a strong desire for public education they will fund it and give it the respect it deserves.

I am not going to bog down in an argument about profit, non-profit....they DO indeed make profit. I argue that they are taking money from public schools.

[RufusTFirefly]

31. I can't R at this point, but I can definitely K!

Profit or non-profit, our public lives are rapidly getting privatized. Ever since the Reagan era, there has been a clear effort to cripple public institutions and the public space to make them vulnerable to takeover by private interests. Public schools are no exception. In fact, they've been a primary target.

The pace at which this is happening is sickening. And the fact that well-meaning folks are becoming unwitting cheerleaders for this dismantling is beyond discouraging.

[traceydouglas]

33. when non-profit really isn't

Agree! And when the administrator of a 'non-profit' charter is paid $400,000 a year to manage one school, well, I call that PROFIT!

[madfloridian]

35. Very true. Welcome to DU.

I am also thinking about Imagine Charters which call themselves non-profit but which have yet to be approved by the IRS as a non-profit.

And TFA which gets millions from local school boards who want to hire their inexperienced teachers with 5 weeks training.

I get really livid when I think about how all those non-profits profit.

[Hannah Bell]

32. yeah, Canada threw an entire class out for low test scores and told the families to go to school

somewhere else.

as for the board being "community people" it depends on what community you mean:

Stanley Druckenmiller:

Stanley Druckenmiller (born 1953 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is the President, CEO, and Chairman of Duquesne Capital, which he founded in 1981. The fund is reported to have more than $10 billion in assets. <1> He managed money for George Soros from 1988 to 2000 as the lead portfolio manager for Quantum Fund. With an estimated current net worth of around $3.5 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 91st-richest person in America. He is reported to have made $260 million in 2008.

Kenneth G. Langone:

Kenneth Langone , (born c. 1935) is a venture capitalist, investment banker and financial backer of The Home Depot, and a former director of the New York Stock Exchange. He was elected as director of Yum! Brands effective October 7, 1997, and is a member of the Audit Committee. Langone is also a trustee of New York University. On July 8, 2010, Geeknet announced that Kenneth Langone was elected Chairman of its Board of Directors.<1> and is now serving as CEO.

Sue Lehmann:

Sue Lehmann "is an executive consultant who donated her services to work with Wendy Kopp and her staff in the internal reorganization of Teach for America in 1999. Lehmann has been an independent consultant for over 25 years and has worked with such prestigious organizations as American Express Company, Dell Computer, IBM, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was the board chair of Teach for America for the latter half of the 1990s and continues to be involved with the organization today." <1>

Wallis Annenberg:

Wallis Huberta Annenberg (b.July 15, 1939, Philadelphia) is the Chairman of the Board, President and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation. She is the daughter of the late Ambassador Walter Hubert Annenberg and his first wife, Bernice Veronica Dunkelman. Walter Annenberg = the late billionaire philanthropist whose newspaper empire was founded on the mafia/bookmaking ties of *his* father.



...etc. What "community" did *you* have in mind? You really think ordinary Harlem residents are going to be on the board? Really?

Billionaires, Hedge Fund Managers, and CEO’s Make up Board of Directors of Harlem Children’s Zone

http://millermps.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/billionaires-hedge-fund-managers-and-ceos-makeup-board-of-directors-of-harlem-children%E2%80%99s-zone/

[traceydouglas]

34. and when class sizes are increasing

due to lack of funding, using $200 million tax dollars to finance a private enterprise is criminal! California schools have classes sizes among the largest in the nation with, perhaps, the most diverse student population in the nation. This amount of public money going to a private school system that can game its student population is obscene.

[BrklynLiberal]

37. Get Schooled! Big is not always bad: How a 4,100-student high school changed a culture and minds

about large schools..

http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2010/09/29/big-is-not-always-bad-how-a-4100-student-high-school-changed-a-culture-and-minds-about-large-schools/

In the last few weeks, I have watched three new documentaries on education that suggest small, intimate settings are more effective in reaching children and raising achievement.

My own view of school size was altered a few years back when I spent a day at Dacula Middle School, then one of the largest in the state. (The opening of a new school the following year decreased the school size.) I was impressed with the school, which did not feel anonymous or chaotic. I expected Grand Central Station at rush hour. Instead, the school was inviting and efficient, and students seemed at ease with the size.

The school functioned well and the classes I saw were engaging, all of which reflects credit on the principal and staff. (I will stand by my observation that Alvin Wilbanks is a great judge of leadership, and has put some very fine people in charge of Gwinnett schools.)

Another one of the schools that shatters the myth that big equals bad is in Brockton, Mass. Take a gander at this excerpt from a New York Times profile of Brockton High, which has 4,100 students:

A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.

Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded administrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym.

Their efforts paid off quickly. In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools. And its turnaround is getting new attention in a report, “How High Schools Become Exemplary,” published last month by Ronald F. Ferguson, an economist at Harvard who researches the minority achievement gap.

What makes Brockton High’s story surprising is that, with 4,100 students, it is an exception to what has become received wisdom in many educational circles — that small is almost always better.

That is why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade breaking down big schools into small academies (it has since switched strategies, focusing more on instruction).

The small-is-better orthodoxy remains powerful. A new movie, “Waiting for Superman,” for example, portrays five charter schools in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere — most with only a few hundred students — as the way forward for American schooling.

Brockton, by contrast, is the largest public school in Massachusetts, and one of the largest in the nation.

At education conferences, Dr. Szachowicz — who became Brockton’s principal in 2004 — still gets approached by small-school advocates who tell her they are skeptical that a 4,100-student school could offer a decent education.

“I tell them we’re a big school that works,“ said Dr. Szachowicz, whose booming voice makes her seem taller than 5-foot-6 as she walks the hallways, greeting students, walkie-talkie in hand.

She and other teachers took action in part because academic catastrophe seemed to be looming, Dr. Szachowicz and several of her colleagues said in interviews here. Massachusetts had instituted a new high school exit exam in 1993, and passing it would be required to graduate a decade later. Unless the school’s culture improved, some 750 seniors would be denied a diploma each year, starting in 2003.

Dr. Szachowicz and Paul Laurino, then the head of the English department — he has since retired — began meeting on Saturdays with any colleagues they could pull together to brainstorm strategies for improving the school.

Shame was an early motivator, especially after the release of the 1999 test scores.

“They were horrible,” Dr. Szachowicz recalled. She painted them in bold letters on poster paper in the group’s Saturday meeting room.

“Is this the best we can be?” she wrote underneath.

<snip>