Shaping Success

Students in the Harlem Children's Zone achieve the results they do, Canada says, because they invest more: They invest more actual time in the classroom, with a far longer school day and a school year that begins in September and ends in early August. All Promise Academy students are in school about 60 percent longer than average public school students. Struggling students can spend twice as many hours in school as the average kid—in class and in tutoring or in small-group before- and after-school instruction. HCZ's corporate and school leaders say they hold each child to high standards and expect teachers to do "whatever it takes" to achieve success. And the charters invest more money per child per year—nearly $19,000 in 2008—than the $14,525 the city spends on children who attend general-education programs in traditional open-enrollment public schools.

The financial investment starts well before the first formal day of kindergarten. The Harlem Children's Zone spends almost as much per child in its Harlem Gems preschool, $13,500, as the city spends on a typical older student. Gems tykes are carefully cultivated and groomed for school; they're in the Promise Academy pipeline already, because Harlem Children's Zone planners hold kindergarten lotteries when a cohort of students is 2 or 3 years old—effectively holding seats until they are old enough to attend kindergarten. In addition, HCZ spends $5,000 per child each year for after-school and extracurricular programs for students who don't attend the Promise Academies but live within the Harlem Children's Zone. Some of the money goes to direct payment of middle school children, for good grades and participation in HCZ programs.

The school day begins at Promise Academy I and II at 8 a.m., even for the youngest students. At Harlem Gems, the lottery admission pre-K program that feeds into the Promise Academies, the day stretches from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. After-school programs, which include 4- and 5-yearolds, run until 6 or 7 p.m. There's Saturday school every weekend, and some teachers and students meet as early as 7 a.m. for intensive test preparation.

"Every single child has to make it," says Shana Brodnax, senior manager of early-childhood programs at the HCZ. "It's an entirely no-excuses-accepted policy that takes an almost incomprehensible amount of resources and support." "Failure is not permitted," vowed Canada, speaking to a public gathering in Springfield, Mass., in November. "No excuses. Failure is not permitted, because funding is tied to success, not failure."

In the world of education, success has many definitions. But the HCZ schools are simply too new to be able to measure success in the vocabulary of graduation or college enrollment—no students have yet graduated from the Promise Academy's high school, so there's no graduation rate to discuss. Regents scores from 2009 are encouraging but preliminary, as only one cohort of students has taken the exams. Nearly 500 young adults who participated in nonschool HCZ programs are now in college, but not much is known about that group.

Instead, at the Promise Academies, success has an explicit benchmark: "We are judged by the New York State tests," says HCZ spokesperson Marty Lipp. "We literally live or die by that test."

Like all other public school students, those at the Promise Academies take statewide assessments every year. The Promise Academy schools have recently posted strong results in math: In 2009, 87 percent of Promise Academy eighth-graders scored at or above grade level, compared with 61 percent overall in District 5. On the state math test, 91 percent of Asian students and 86 percent of white students citywide scored at or above grade level, as did a mere 62 percent of black students in the city's schools. Since the Promise Academy is 91 percent black, its high scores suggest a far narrower racial achievement gap than might otherwise be expected.