Beyond Miracles

David Brooks has officially gotten under my skin. He's irritated me before, but now, he's really done it. If he's going to insist on writing about education, he should at least figure out what he's talking about before his next column.

What's sent me into a tizzy here is his column from last Thursday on The Harlem Miracle, by which he means the Harlem Children's Zone. Apparently, Brooks got his hands on a study showing that students who entered the Harlem Children's Zone Promise Academy in 6th grade made huge gains in math by the time they were in eighth grade. The gains are big enough to prompt Brooks to write things like, "In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students." Pretty big talk.

So what does Brooks think the take-away from all this is? Naturally, it's that his ideas about "no excuses" schools are correct. He thinks that this shows that the "reformers" (a word he limits exclusively to hard line idealocrats) are correct and all those other people who want things like smaller class sizes, better teachers, increased social investment (in other words, the "status quo" crowd) are wrong.

First of all, let's set aside for the moment the fact that the numbers showing this overwhelming success aren't quite as overwhelmingly positive as Brooks seems to think. (Thanks to skoolboy at Gotham Schools for pointing this out.) In fact, even with his own internal logic, it's clear that Brooks doesn't know what he's talking about.

Brooks writes: "Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone can’t produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right." (Got to love the way he sets reformers against those "surrounding the educational establishment.") Then he recommends that people read Whatever It Takes to learn more.

Had Brooks himself actually read Whatevere It Takes, he would know that the Harlem Children's Zone doesn't try to leverage all of its change solely from the school. In fact, a huge chunk of the HCZ model is focused on the kinds of "broader issues" that "reformers" have now refuted. Is it possible that the New York Times is letting Brooks write about things that he clearly doesn't understand? I get that Brooks is a columnist, not an investigative reporter, but come on. Do some research.

Also, Roland Fryer, who Brooks credits as the one who got the mental ball rolling for him, is on my annoying list too. The last we saw of Fryer, he was promoting a plan that was going to pay students for earning good grades. That was the miracle silver bullet that was going to solve all of education's problems. Except that it didn't work. So now we're looking at the Harlem Children's Zone as the miracle that has "changed [his] scientific life."

I don't object to the idea that Fryer is constantly looking for the next best thing and I applaud his willingness to keep moving when things don't work and try to find something that does. The lack of constancy doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that each new policy is THE ONE that's going to fix everything. The problems facing education are inextricably linked with the problems of poverty, race, and societal breakdown in ghetto communities. Expecting to find a silver bullet is a little bit silly. Telling people like David Brooks that you've found one is almost harmful.

Change I Can Believe In

At an event this weekend, I had the opportunity to sit in on a conversation between Geoffrey Canada, the founder and director of the Harlem Children's Zone, and Paul Tough, the author of Whatever it Takes, a book about the HCZ. As I was listening to them speak, I kept thinking to myself, "Here's a guy who gets it."

The idea behind the HCZ is that high poverty neighborhoods like Harlem need an extra boost in order to have the things that middle class neighborhoods take for granted. The Children's Zone sponsors a baby college for expecting and new parents to help prepare them to be ready to actually raise a child. Not a bad idea for a neighborhood with high teen pregnancy rates. Babt College seeks to imbue parents with some of the skills and values that we know can lead to successful children in this society.

The HCZ also offers intensive educational programs for kids as early as two and seeks to provide health services that are needed. Finally, the kids transition into an HCZ run school where they stay from kindergarten through 12th grade. The program is designed to provide a "cradle to college" experience similar to what is taken for granted in more affluent communities. This simply makes sense.

Canada also impressed me with his analysis of schools like KIPP and Achievement First. As he said, "The teachers in those schools are heroes, no question about it. But we can't expect to have heroes in every classroom." The answer is not to make up the difference when kids fall behind, it's to make sure that they don't fall behind in the first place. I couldn't agree more. We can't argue that every teacher should be exceptional - it's just impossible. But we can do our best to make sure that good (though unexceptional) teachers are all that is needed.

As no one has yet gone through the entire program from cradle to college, it's too early to tell if the program is actually going to be successful. But I really hope it is. I think that this program, more than any other that I'm aware of, points the way toward a replicable model of school/urban reform.