Schoolhouse Rock: FIXING THE EDUCATION SYSTEM.

Replication

My month as Slate's resident Schoolhouse Rocker comes to an end today, and so with this post I hang up my blogger's keyboard. (Not entirely, actually; for the last few weeks I've been maintaining a bare-bones book blog for news about Whatever It Takes, and I'll keep that one going indefinitely.)

I'm grateful to my editors at Slate for giving me this opportunity, and I'm grateful to all the readers who wrote me with tips, suggestions, and stories about life in the classroom.

John McCain and Barack Obama aren't talking too much about education on the campaign trail these days—it probably has something to do with the whole two-wars-plus-collapse-of-capitalism thing. But nonetheless, the next president will take office at a moment of crisis and change in the public education system, and whichever candidate wins, he'll have a chance to push the conversation, and the system itself, in some new directions.

The local developments I've been writing about here—teacher-contract negotiations in Denver and D.C.; experimental schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco and the Bronx and New Haven—are crucial laboratories and test cases for national policy, and the next president will have the opportunity to expand, refine, and build on those experiments. There are some other useful steps he could take right away. He could make school financing more equitable (a Berkeley law professor named Goodwin Liu has some good ideas on how to do that). He could fund more education R&D. (You could fill volumes with what we don't know about which educational practices actually work.) And he could construct accountability models that are more precise and humane than those found in No Child Left Behind.

Both candidates have some good ideas in their education platforms and some smart advisers. And though neither candidate has moved too far away from his party's traditional approach to education, Obama seems more willing to look for new and innovative solutions, ideas that might stir up the stagnant politics of education.

To me, one of the most significant planks in Obama's education platform isn't in his education platform at all-it's in his poverty platform: his pledge to replicate Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the United States, as public/private partnerships, with the federal government's share of the bill coming to as much as a few billion dollars. Each city's version of the program would be unique, but presumably each would include a charter school as well as intensive preschool programs, after-school tutoring, and family counseling. And I would hope that each replication would include a program, like the Harlem Children's Zone's Baby College, that would encourage parents to adopt better child-rearing strategies. (I had a piece on This American Life this weekend about Baby College and the complicated process of trying to sway Harlem's parents toward different methods.)

There are a lot of potential obstacles to Obama's pledge becoming a reality (including the fact that he will have to be elected president before he can do much about it). As I wrote earlier this month in the New York Times Magazine,

A lot of conservatives would oppose a new multibillion-dollar federal program as a Great Society-style giveaway to the poor. And many liberals are wary of any program that tries to change the behavior of inner-city parents; to them, teaching poor parents to behave more like middle-class parents can feel paternalistic. Union leaders will find it hard to support an effort that has nonunion charter schools at its heart. Education reformers often support Canada's work, but his premise-that schools alone are not enough to make a difference in poor children's lives-makes many of them anxious.

There aren't yet airtight data to prove that Canada's model works—though as I wrote earlier this month, the numbers coming out of his elementary schools are very promising. And so rather than simply cloning the Zone and airdropping it into communities around the country, Obama's replication project will work best if each city is encouraged to adapt and innovate, to compete with every other city for the best results. (As Obama said in his speech announcing the plan, "every step these cities take will be evaluated, and if certain plans or programs aren't working, we will stop them and try something else.")

Obama's "Promise Neighborhoods" could challenge the traditional division between education policy and poverty policy—between improving schools and improving the lives of poor families. Geoffrey Canada's argument is that it no longer makes sense to think of each one separately. If we try to fix the schools in a low-income neighborhood without addressing the other needs of students there, it's not a real solution to the neighborhood's problems. And it isn't enough to provide social services to poor children if their neighborhood schools are still giving them a lousy education. A true solution to the problem of underachievement in inner-city public schools is going to require more nurturing families and safer neighborhoods as well as better teachers and more accountable schools. That's the real point of the Harlem Children's Zone, and, I think, it's going to be the next chapter in the debate over schools.

The Zone

The reason I think the Harlem Children's Zone is so important—the reason I wrote a whole book about the program—is that I think it's the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.

What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood, starting at birth and going all the way through college. It is based on two innovative ideas. The first is what Canada calls the Conveyor Belt—a system that reaches kids early and then moves them through a seamless series of programs that try to re-create the invisible cocoon of support that surrounds middle-class and upper-middle-class kids throughout their childhoods. The Conveyor Belt starts with Baby College, a nine-week program that provides expecting parents and parents of young children with new information about effective parenting strategies. The next stop is an all-day language-focused pre-kindergarten for 200 4-year-olds, who then graduate into a K-12 charter school that has an extended day and an extended year and employs some of the intensive academic practices developed in the KIPP schools. Throughout their academic careers, students at the school have access to social supports: after-school tutoring, a teen arts center, family counseling, and a health clinic.

The second idea is a tipping-point notion—what Canada refers to as contamination. His theory is that in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood, if you offer social and educational supports to just a few of the kids who live there, their participation will always seem a bit oddball, and they won't have much of an effect on their peers. But if you get participation rates up to 40 percent or 50 percent or 60 percent, then taking part will come to seem normal, and some of the behaviors that used to seem commonplace in Harlem—teenage pregnancy, drug use, dropping out of school—will start to seem like the oddball path. The engaged kids will "contaminate" their friends with their behaviors and attitudes.

Canada's system isn't easy. It requires a lot of hard work just to keep it in motion. And in the years that I spent reporting in Harlem, Canada and his staff made lots of wrong turns and hit plenty of dead ends. In the book, I followed one class of parents through Baby College, and some of them, it seemed, faced such big deficits and such huge obstacles in life—they couldn't read, they had had other children taken away by Child Services, they had spent a couple of years in jail—that it seemed hard to believe they would ever be truly effective parents. In the middle school, the first couple of years were quite rocky, as Canada struggled to combine the ethos of a community organization with the accountability of a no-excuses charter school.

By the time I finished my reporting, though, the middle school was starting to find its footing, and the elementary schools, where some of the students had been with the Harlem Children's Zone since Baby College, were truly thriving. The third-grade test scores last spring were good—at one charter school, 97 percent of the third-grade class was on grade level in math, and in the other, 100 percent were. (The English scores were lower, but they were still quite good. At one school, they were 10 points above the state average, and at the other they were just a point or two below the state average.)

And perhaps more importantly, the elementary schools and the kids in them felt somehow ... normal. When I spent time in the classrooms, I got the strong feeling that when these kids got to middle school, they weren't going to need the kind of heroic interventions that Promise Academy and most charter middle schools need to employ today. They wouldn't need remediation and advanced character-building and constant test prep—they would just be competent, engaged students for the rest of their school careers. And these are kids who, for the most part, came from low-income, often difficult backgrounds, with a fair number of teenage parents and parents who didn't complete high school.

They were exactly the same kind of kids, in other words, who arrived in the sixth grade in the first year of Promise Academy middle school, the ones who showed up reading three and four years behind grade level, and whose subsequent middle school careers were a constant struggle. This new generation of kids had the good fortune to find a place on the Conveyor Belt, and that meant they faced a very different kind of future than most kids growing up in Harlem.