A page-turning dispatch from inside the most daring and

potentially transformative social experiment of our time

Geoffrey Canada is a driven, brilliant crusader for children whose

bold approach to inner-city poverty has been called by Barack

Obama an all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort that is literally saving

a generation of children. Canada's radical new idea: if you really want

to change the lives of poor children, you have to change everything --

their schools, their families, their neighborhoods — all at once.

Paul Tough gained exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to Geoffrey

Canada as the Harlem Children's Zone grew to become a $58-million-a-

year organization, encompassing 97 city blocks and reaching more

than 7,000 children. In Tough's inspired portrait, sure to be as deeply

influential as Tracy Kidder's of Paul Farmer, Canada shares center stage

with the parents and children of Harlem as they hopefully, anxiously

enter a conveyor belt of integrated programs, from Baby College to

Harlem Gems to Promise Academy.

There's Victor Boria, nineteen, who enters Baby College on the

verge of breaking up with his pregnant teenage girlfriend — and then,

nine weeks later, proposes to her onstage in front of a jubilant crowd.

And there's Wilma Jure, waiting and praying that her four-year-old

niece, whose mother is homeless, will win a spot in Canada's new

kindergarten class. Finally, Tough vividly describes Canada's passion

for change and how it is playing out in real time — as educators and

policymakers from across the country keenly watch. Whatever It Takes

is a tour de force of suspenseful and brilliantlyinformed reporting.

"New York Times journalist Tough profiles educational visionary Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children's Zone — currently serving more than 7,000 children and encompassing 97 city blocks — represents an audacious effort to end poverty within underserved communities. Canada's radical experiment is predicated upon changing everything in these communities — creating an interlocking web of services targeted at the poorest and least likely to succeed children: establishing programs to prepare and support parents, a demanding k-8 charter school and a range of after-school programs for high school students. Tough adeptly integrates the intensely personal stories of the staff, students and teachers of the Children's Zone with expert opinions and the broiling debates over poverty, race and education. The author's admiration for Canada and his 'social experiment' is obvious yet tempered by journalistic restraint as he summarizes the current understanding of the causes of poverty and academic underperformance — and their remedies. Smoothly narrated, affecting and heartening, this book gives readers a solid look at the problems facing poor communities and their reformers, as well as good cause to be optimistic about the future. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Three questions lie at the heart of Paul Tough's important new book. Why are poor people poor? Why do they stay poor? And what would it take to get them out of poverty? Theories about the causes of lasting poverty and cures for the problem have long fueled debate and wide public policy swings. Throughout, generations of a disenfranchised underclass have remained stuck in a cycle of perpetual penury.

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Enter Geoffrey Canada, a charismatic black man on a mission to deliver his people. Born in 1952 to a single welfare mother of four, Canada defied the odds, finding his way out of a South Bronx tenement and into a single-family house in the burbs. He has made it his life's work to enable others to do the same. But as president of a nonprofit that ran a handful of youth programs, he found his reach limited and the effects of his efforts often short-lived. That got him thinking about what it would really take to get Harlem's poor children into the mainstream. Canada came up with a social experiment so radical and potentially transforming that Barack Obama has promised a "few billion dollars a year" to replicate it in 20 cities should he become president.

Canada's idea: Instead of offering discrete programs to ameliorate certain aspects of poverty, he would do it all. He would create a safety net so tightly knit and widely spread that not only would it prevent an entire community of kids from falling through, it would actually propel them out of poverty. In fact, the net would be a continuous series of integrated interventions beginning with pre-natal parenting classes and intensive early childhood programs up to college. More than anything else, the poverty-busting project would imbue poor black children and their families with solid, middle-class values that would become contagious. "If we touch enough kids at the same time with the same message, then it won't seem unusual to think, 'I should do well in school, I should speak proper English, I should do my homework,'" reasoned Canada.

Without Canada's bona fides, the plan could have easily been dismissed as cultural imperialism. But coming from him, a program to develop the cultural mindset by which poor black kids could acquire the same attitudes and cognitive skills as their more privileged and successful peers made sense to the community and wealthy backers. Canada called his crusade the Harlem Children's Zone and chose a 24-block section of Harlem as his laboratory. Paul Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, began tracking the effort in 2003. The result is "Whatever It Takes," a you-are-there recording of the project's development, amazing growth and potential promise — and an informed primer on the correlation between race, poverty and the achievement gap in America.

This is a serious book about a pressing issue, but Tough manages to make it an easy read with a cast of sympathetic characters. Eager students in the Zone's Baby College, a nine-week parenting course, include Victor Boria, a high-school dropout with a criminal record, and Shauntel Jones, a 32-year-old expectant mom whose other children have been taken away from her by the city's child welfare agency. The benefactor who keeps the belt running is Stanley Druckenmiller, a quiet Wall Street honcho and registered Republican. But in this fast-paced narrative of trial and triumph, the undisputed hero is Canada.

The dramatic tension in the book derives from the problems plaguing urban education. A few years into the project, when he realized that crummy local schools were a major snag in his net, Canada opened his own charter school called Promise Academy. He started the elementary school with two grades: kindergarten and sixth. As each class advanced, he intended to add a grade until the school spanned grades K-12. Though he believed that closing the achievement gap required a wholesale change of the environment in which poverty breeds, he also embraced the outcomes-based, no-excuses approach of education reformers like KIPP, the successful charter-school chain that insists that schools must compensate for the disadvantages of dysfunctional families and lousy neighborhoods. "I'm for vouchers, I'm for charter schools — I'm for anything that blows up the status quo," Canada tells the author. To the parents who show up for the lottery that will determine which lucky few get a spot in his new charter, he says: "If your child is in our school, we will guarantee that child succeeds. There will be no excuses. We're not going to say, 'The child failed because they came from a home with only one parent.'"

Three years later, Canada had to eat his words when the inaugural sixth grade class failed to achieve the academic results he had expected of them in eighth grade. The ultimate pragmatist, he put the school's expansion into high school on hold, leaving angry parents scrambling to find new schools for their dejected children.

Missing from the book is a clear explication of what went wrong. Students in the lower grades at Promise Academy appeared to thrive, validating research that indicates the importance of early intervention. But the middle school, despite huge investments of time, energy and resources, suffered from the high rates of teacher turnover and student attrition endemic to urban education. Canada placed the blame on teachers; the staff pointed to parents and students.

We don't know how this story will end. Time will tell if Geoffrey Canada has hit on what it will take to break the cycle of poverty in America. In the meantime, there are lessons to be learned from the Harlem Children's Zone — about the power of an idea, the role culture plays in student achievement, accountability, the indomitable human spirit. This book should be on every policymaker's reading list.

Donna Foote's book "Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America" was published this year.

Reviewed by Donna Foote, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Geoffrey Canada is a driven, brilliant crusader for children who argues that to change the lives of poor children, everything has to change--their schools, their families, their neighborhoods--all at once. Tough offers a behind-the-scenes look at Canada's Harlem Children's Zone organization.