HCZ's physical presence is easy to see. Take the intersection of Madison and 125th. On one corner, an empty shell of a building languishes. On another, there's a row of shops—some vacant, others full—topped by the derelict Mason and Trowel ballroom. But directly across the street, dominating the block and the local skyline with six spanking new stories of steel, glass and brick, sits the Harlem Children's Zone headquarters, a $44 million structure that exudes both permanence and wealth.
City Limits Magazine
March 2010:
Hope or Hype in Harlem
News Topics
The Economy
Justice
Education
Government
Author
Helen Zelon
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Instead, back in 1994, the weight was squarely on social services; schools were out of the picture. "We had committed ourselves to not going into that business in the early '90s," says longtime treasurer Mitch Kurz. "We didn't want to have to deal with the old [Board of Education] bureaucracy." Schools meant risk: If the program quality suffered, Kurz says, "the brand would be attached to something mediocre, and that would hurt the brand and hurt our ability to make money" to support the programs.
Working with the local schools in the 1990s meant wrangling with local school boards, which were variously indebted to, or controlled by, local politicians. "Geoff Canada was very soured on the inability of the public school system to educate Harlem children, or children of color, period," says Annenberg's Fruchter. "There were two villains: the UFT [United Federation of Teachers], which Geoff held responsible for what teachers didn't do and for being embedded in local politics, and the local politicians," who controlled school boards, as had long been the case in Harlem's District 5.
During its first decade, the HCZ pipeline grew more robust, but the results Canada and his team sought, in terms of academic achievement and progress out of poverty, did not materialize. "We realized this hole in our service provision, particularly in District 5, and the hole was in the schools," says Kurz.
Too few children were succeeding—Canada felt there had to be a way to scale up the effort and save all the kids, instead of a handful. Canada's frustration with the city's public schools continued undimmed. By January 2002, when Bloomberg began his first term, Canada had worked with five schools chancellors. But in the summer of 2002, for the first time since the Boss Tweed era, the mayor secured control of the city's schools. With Bloomberg's blessing, new schools chancellor Joel Klein cultivated vigorous private support for public schools from corporations and nonprofits.
"The charter school movement changed the landscape," says Kurz, a multimillionaire who, after a career in advertising, now serves as HCZ treasurer and works with the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, a small high school where he teaches math and serves as a college adviser. "The mayor and the chancellor were both pro-change, and [an HCZ] board with pre-existing relationships, particularly with the mayor, enabled us to get in front of the chancellor."
Klein met with Canada early in his tenure as chancellor and suggested that Canada bypass the traditional open-enrollment public schools and open his own charter school, which would become central to the Harlem Children's Zone pipeline of cradle-to- college programs. Canada and his team wrote a proposal, recruited teachers and administrators, and organized an admissions lottery that meant door-knocking across the Zone's 24 blocks. In 2004, the Promise Academy elementary and middle schools opened their doors.
