'There Is No Science': Geoffrey Canada's Philosophy

Harlem — This article is part of our special reporting on the Harlem Children’s Zone, the antipoverty initiative examined in depth in the current issue of City Limits magazine, Hope or Hype in Harlem?

A native of the South Bronx who went on to Bowdoin College and Harvard University, Geoffrey Canada launched the Harlem Children's Zone in 1994 as a comprehensive network of services for neighborhood youth and their families, aimed at saving children from drugs, violence and poverty and getting them through college. His program is being used by the Obama administration as a model for Promise Neighborhoods, a set of 20 poverty reduction campaigns in areas around the country.

Canada lives with his family in Valley Stream, on Long Island, but comes to work at the Harlem Children's Zone headquarters on the corner of 125th Street and Madison Avenue. His sun-soaked corner office, facing southeast, offers views of the city spread like a glittering banquet on an asphalt table. Seated at a round conference table, wearing a crisp button-down monogrammed "GC" over his heart, a striped tie, his omnipresent gold bracelet and gold knot cufflinks, Canada spoke with City Limits in early January. Here are highlights from that interview.

You have said that the Harlem Children's Zone is midway through a 20-year completion cycle. How do you define success? What benchmark tells you the work is successful—or not?

The only benchmark of success is college graduation. That's the only one: How many kids you got in college, how many kids you got out. Everything else is interim.

Look, people make a big deal of fourth-grade reading scores. It's great, they're indicators, they give you some idea. Kids reading well, that just gives us an indication of how much more work we have to do. If you ask me, kids that get good reading scores, then they don't get any other help—where are they going to be in a few years? They're not going to do well. They could fail the 4th grade reading test. I guarantee you, if that kid stays in the [HCZ] program, that kid is going to college. I guarantee it. No doubt in my mind.

We know GEDs mean nothing—they mean nothing. Getting a kid through high school means nothing, nothing. So what? You get a kid doing well in eighth grade. They graduate high school and get into college. That means nothing. There is only one answer: You've got to get these kids to graduate college, that's the only thing that means something. Everything else is interim.

So, are the results suggestive of success? Yes—they give you some indication you're moving in the right direction. But meaningful in and of itself? No. It's just an indicator that we're moving in the right direction.

If you can't measure actual success for another decade, do you know whether your programs are working? How do you evaluate them now?

That's a great question. You have to have interim success measures. Each of my programs, starting with Baby College, has a set of outcomes that we look at which suggest to us that we're on the right path. They're just suggestive. So, did the parents learn key essentials in brain development? We think that if more did, then that's a precursor for getting their children prepared to enter pre-K on grade level. And then, we test all the kids to see who's struggling, who's not struggling.

You have set a 65 percent "tipping point" as a universal goal for your programs, after which you think success becomes inevitable. How did you determine that 65 percent was the tipping point?