Harlem Children’s Zone is a ‘conveyor belt’ of social programmes designed to transform the prospects of a whole community – not just the lucky few. And despite formidable challenges, it looks set to become a national success story, says James Forman Jr.

The promise of equal opportunity is one of America’s founding myths. Like most myths, this one is partially true. In November 2008, it was movingly vindicated when the nation elected an African-American president.

Yet many Americans remain trapped by the circumstances of their birth. In Washington, DC, one can find some of the nation’s poorest neighbourhoods just three miles east of the US Capitol. In these all-black communities, few people work (unemployment is higher than 50 per cent), many are ensnared in the criminal justice system (one in three black men in DC are in prison, on probation or parole, or awaiting trial) and almost half the children are born into poverty. If change is needed anywhere, it is here.

Since the 1960s, however, our efforts to fight these problems have narrowed. Reformers of my parents’ generation fought entrenched poverty in a variety of ways: robust civil rights laws, better housing, an expanded social safety net and an increased minimum wage. These days, the fight to improve the life prospects of ghetto residents is concentrated almost exclusively in one domain: education.

I understand the impulse to see schooling as the solution. I began my legal career as a public defender in Washington, representing poor and working-class juveniles. In the juvenile justice system, a good public defender acts largely as a social worker, trying to find resources for his clients. If I could identify a programme that met a young man’s (or, less often, a young woman’s) needs, there was a decent chance that the judge would put him there instead of locking him up. But I quickly ran into a fundamental problem: what could I do when there were no good programmes?

I remember one client who had been ordered to go to school every day and prove it by having his teachers sign an attendance card. When he showed up in court with the card half-empty, I was furious. My client responded by challenging me to accompany him to school, and off we went.

This was supposed to be an alternative trade school for students who had been kicked out of their regular schools. But the auto body class had no car or car parts, just an outdated textbook. The only trade programme with functioning equipment was the barbering class, where kids learned to cut hair. One class I visited was watching a bootleg martial arts video instead of studying. When I asked about this unusual choice, the teacher told me that “interesting videos” were the only way to keep the class "in control and in their seats".

I soon realised that asking judges to send my clients to schools like this one was not a solution. I was only postponing the day that the kids would end up in jail. At least for me, the classroom needed to replace the courtroom as the place to work for change. Along with another lawyer named David Domenici, I started an after-school tutoring programme that eventually grew into a full-time school.

Today, our school, named for the poet Maya Angelou, comprises four campuses and serves about 700 students. At Maya Angelou, classes are small, expectations are high and our students develop strong relationships with caring adults. Our target population includes court-involved youth as well as students who are struggling in (or have been kicked out of) the District of Columbia’s traditional schools.

The Maya Angelou School has had its share of successes, including sending kids to university after the rest of the world had given up on them. One of the students I came to know best was a young woman named Samantha, who was charged with a serious crime and was represented by one of my fellow public defenders. When Samantha first tried to get into our school, the judge called her “a menace to society” and rejected the idea out of hand. But eventually he relented, and though Samantha hit many bumps along her road, she graduated from high school and enrolled in college. Samantha is now seeking a degree in special education, a career choice she explains by saying: “I’ve seen the good that teachers can do in the world through my own life.” Most rewarding is the fact that Samantha now works at our school as a counsellor for kids charged with crime, many of whom believe they have no future. She spends her days convincing them that they are wrong, and the lesson is much more persuasive coming from her than from me.

But though it is important to celebrate success stories like Samantha’s, we also have students who don’t achieve their dreams. Many of the teens who find their way to the Maya Angelou School are years behind academically. They may not have had the family support – and they certainly haven’t had the educational opportunities – that more privileged children enjoy. And while students such as Samantha may beat the odds, many others are overwhelmed by the challenges they face. We know, moreover, that a programme such as ours reaches only a small percentage of the young people who need the kind of services that we offer.

Beyond the classroom

This is the challenge that Geoffrey Canada set out to address. He started out as director of a neighbourhood organisation that offered a range of programmes for young people in Harlem. The programmes helped, but Canada soon grew tired of saving a few kids while the rest of the neighbourhood remained poor and violent. So in 1997, he created the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an extensive network of social programmes that includes parenting classes, health clinics, tutoring centres and schools that serve children and families in a 97-square-block area of Harlem.

Canada describes HCZ’s social programmes as a “conveyor belt” taking children from cradle to college. Young parents attend HCZ’s Baby College, where they learn to read to their children, take them to museums and libraries, and discipline them without relying on physical punishment. The children of Baby College graduates enrol in Harlem Gems, a pre-kindergarten programme that emphasises language skills. From there, they go to Promise Academy, where 100 per cent of third graders recently scored at or above grade level on statewide maths tests.

To achieve Canada’s goal of community transformation, the conveyor belt programmes need to be widely available. In addition, meaningful opportunities must be offered to young people who, for whatever reason, did not get on the conveyor belt at an early age. This leads to what Canada calls “contamination”. As he has explained: “When you’ve got most of the kids in a neighbourhood in high-quality programmes, you begin to change the cultural context of that neighbourhood. If you are surrounded by people who are always talking about going to college, you’re going to end up thinking: ‘Hey, maybe this is something I could do, too.’ You can’t help but get contaminated by that idea. It just seeps into your pores, and you don’t even know that you’ve caught the virus.”

HCZ has become a superstar among nonprofits. If you ask experts who is doing the best work fighting urban poverty, Canada’s organisation almost always gets a mention. Why such acclaim? For one thing, while HCZ’s long-term impact cannot yet be measured, it has achieved impressive early results in a field where failure is more common than success. Good publicity helps, too – HCZ has had the good fortune to have its story told by journalist Paul Tough, most recently in a compelling book called Whatever It Takes. And then there is the matter of Canada himself. He is charismatic but not showy, inspiring and yet authentic. It is hard to imagine him entering a room to meet a funder and leaving without some money in his hand.

A broad appeal

But there is more, I suspect, to HCZ’s success than any of this. HCZ occupies an unusual place on the ideological spectrum, one that allows it to appeal to both sides of divisive social policy debates. Consider one example. If poor people are to improve their lives, should they change their behaviours or should society do more for them? Instead of choosing a side, HCZ’s model says that the answer is both. Drawing on decades of research showing that certain middle-class parenting techniques prepare children to navigate school and the world, HCZ teaches those techniques to Harlem parents. At the same time, it recognises that parental skills are only part of the puzzle. After all, poor parents already know what to do when their child says: “My tooth hurts”; the American scandal is that many parents cannot afford to take their children to a dentist. In response, HCZ provides medical and dental care for families that need it.

HCZ similarly elides the debate over how much academic improvement we can expect from schools without improving conditions in the neighbourhoods around them. Canada is unapologetically demanding of the educators who work in HCZ. His schools struggled in their early years, and he dismissed so many people for underperformance that, when faced with a new round of poor results, he said in dismay: “I want to fire somebody. But everybody’s already been fired.” At the same time, Canada recognises that schools and teachers need help. The only way that many Harlem children can compete with their middle-class peers is through HCZ’s massive investment in school- and community-based supports, including individual tutoring, after-school and weekend programmes, and summer school. HCZ works beyond the school in other ways as well, organising tenants to improve housing conditions and leading a neighbourhood-wide initiative to fight asthma, which affects one in three Harlem children.

HCZ has something to offer both sides of one final educational policy dispute: do urban schools need more money or do they need to spend it more effectively? Again, HCZ’s answer is both. More money by itself will not do the trick, as HCZ learned early on. Despite the extra money that it spends on its schools, early academic results were disappointing. The schools eventually improved, but only after massive reorganisation, with more rigorous instruction and greater attention to discipline. The money – while not enough by itself – is still essential because it pays for the comprehensive extra services that fuel HCZ’s success. “More money, better spent” – it’s not on the HCZ website, but perhaps it ought to be.

Essentially, HCZ is attempting to solve one of America’s most vexing social problems through a pragmatic, outcome-driven approach with appeal across the ideological spectrum. Sound familiar? Given President Obama’s instincts, it should come as no surprise that he has endorsed a plan to expand the HCZ model to at least 20 ‘Promise Neighbourhoods’ across the country. If this happens, it will be a true social policy success story. An intrepid community-based organiser hatches a plan, meets with some success and sees his model replicated on a national scale.

Still, there are formidable obstacles to scaling up HCZ. After all, Canada’s approach requires significant public and private sector investment. Much of HCZ’s private support has been garnered from Wall Street types who work on the other end of Manhattan from Harlem. Even if Obama takes care of the government’s portion, will the private money flow as freely, given the current economic crisis? And will it flow to places remote from Wall Street, such as Indianapolis and Phoenix? Similarly, where will we find leaders to make the project work in communities around the US? While the HCZ model has widespread appeal, implementing it across the US will require, among other things, high-quality leadership of a kind that is frustratingly hard to find.

Canada’s work reminds us that the myth of equal opportunity is not necessarily a source of complacency (as in: “Now that we have a black president, stop complaining about racism”). It can also serve as a call to action and racial uplift. African-Americans have long demanded that the United States make good on the revolutionary promises of its founding. “All we say to America is: ‘Be true to what you said on paper’,” declared Martin Luther King Jr – and Canada was certainly born into this tradition. “For me,” he told Paul Tough, “the big question in America is: Are we going to try to make this country a true meritocracy? Or will we forever have a class of people in America who essentially won’t be able to compete, because the game is fixed against them?” The answer to this question depends, in part, on the fate of Canada’s experiment in Harlem.

Schools without boundaries

The RSA’s Schools Without Boundaries programme recognises that schools alone cannot provide young people with everything they need to thrive in and shape the world around them. It is therefore pioneering new ways for schools and communities to work together to improve the educational opportunities and experience of all their students.