Going National

Doubts about test scores shouldn't nullify all the optimism about the Harlem Children's Zone schools. Lots of schools are accused of "teaching to the test" and cherry-picking the numbers they present to the world, but the Promise Academies happen to have better numbers than many. That the gains are pretty recent and largely limited to the state tests, that they contrast sharply with the same schools' performance just a few years ago, even the serious problems with teacher turnover—these don't invalidate the idea that something special is going on in Harlem. They might just be warning signs for those hoping to replicate the Harlem model elsewhere: There are curves in the road, slippery conditions, even sudden stops.

There also might be more than one road. What's often overlooked in the warm glow of media attention to HCZ is the fact that other traditional public schools and charter networks achieve comparably robust test scores, with lower per-student spending and often without the extended day–extended year paradigm. Dozens of open-admission public schools and charters, in New York and the nation, demonstrate ongoing, dramatic success with high-need, high-poverty students. Some have progressive educational policies; others hew to a more traditional, structured, prescriptive style. Established national programs like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Achievement First and the Opportunity Charter Network, as well as individual local charter schools like Boston's Roxbury Prep and the Bedford Stuyvesant Charter School for Excellence in Brooklyn, achieve comparable results without the vast HCZ network of social supports— or the HCZ's copious financial resources.

The success of these schools and programs does not diminish HCZ's work. Rather, they are alternative models that often deliver similar gains for far less money, going to the heart of the challenge in designing new responses to poverty. Does urban poverty have a single cure? Or do different models, with unique approaches, have their place? And are great schools enough to tackle poverty, or do neighborhoods need a broader array of resources? The two strands of HCZ—its social programs and its schools—are supposed to work together to transform central Harlem. But while state testing data and other statistics—about attendance, poverty, spending and the like—are accessible for the Promise Academy charter schools, HCZ's broader social programs, which were the founding purpose of the Zone, are far more difficult to assess objectively. Although some are 15 years old, the impact of these programs is obscured by immaturity: The data are not yet comprehensive or ripe enough to demonstrate conclusively that the pipeline actually works, or that the 65 percent critical mass that Canada identifies as the tipping point to positive "contamination" has been reached in any meaningful way.

While Canada says publicly, "We've been really successful with teen pregnancy," independent verification is impossible. Births to teenage mothers are down slightly in the community district containing most of the Zone, but they have fallen in adjoining neighborhoods as well, and the causes cannot be discerned. Employment data show little change in the HCZ era; at least one HCZ job-training program fizzled and was shuttered when it didn't reach its intended targets. After two years, "the young people we designed the jobs program for were not coming in. The program was a failure. We closed the program. It just simply did not work," Canada said at the public gathering in November in Springfield. He added, "We are probably the biggest youth employer in Harlem," but no public data exist to support—or refute—his claim. The 2010 census might provide more accurate insights about birth rate and family structures, despite concerns about data-gathering and incomplete counting in poor communities. But current hard data are lacking, says Lisbeth Schorr, of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Social Policy and a lecturer in social medicine at Harvard. "What Geoffrey Canada has accomplished is to give people a reason to believe that you can put a lot of things that have worked separately together and produce better outcomes. He doesn't have the data to show that. It's an inspiration," Schorr says. "The fact that they don't have a lot of hard results hasn't kept people from being inspired by it. He's been so successful at convincing people it can be done that there's no challenge for hard data."