Geoffrey Canada Marshals an Army of Love

Laura Varlas

As an undergraduate student, Geoffrey Canada wanted to be a psychology major but worried about passing the requisite statistics course. After failing his first statistics test miserably, he went to the teacher for help. His teacher told him that each textbook is written on a slant and that he just needed to try one written to his slant. Little did Canada know that this was a clever strategy to get him studying two textbooks simultaneously. Canada aced statistics, but the larger lesson of out-of-the-box and any-means-necessary teaching and learning would guide his later work at Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ).

For 20 years, Canada has led the whole child, full-service community school mission at HCZ. He’s been named one of the country’s best leaders by U.S. News and World Report and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes, and HCZ has been heralded everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the White House—the Obama administration intends to fund replications of the HCZ model in 20 major cities. At Saturday morning's Opening General Session, he spoke to a packed house of ASCD Annual Conference attendees eager to learn more about his work.

Aimed at breaking the cycle of generational poverty, HCZ serves 100 blocks and 10,000 children and their families through programs that follow children from birth to college, attending to their social, emotional, physical, and academic needs. For example, families benefit from the attention of 70 on-staff social workers, and 80 percent of students receive dental care from HCZ’s site-based clinic. Last year, the organization even filed 4,000 tax refunds on behalf of their community members.

Canada’s philosophy circumvents choices about what schools should attend to. Should we save kids in crisis or prevent kids from slipping? We’ve got to do both, Canada told the ASCD audience. In Canada’s worldview, meeting students’ basic needs should be the floor, not the ceiling of what school communities aspire to.

"It's not my decision who does or doesn't go to college—I have the same expectations for the kids I get paid to work for as I do for my own kids," Canada said.

No one is going to save our children but us, Canada told the crowd. Currently, the only nationally scalable solution for students who drop out and can’t find jobs is prison. And it’s no secret, Canada added, which students are on this path. "If I can take you to the zip codes where these kids are coming from, why do we wait until they’re 5 [years old] to help them?"

At HCZ, they don’t wait. All day preK and "Baby College" programs help parents understand that their children's education starts at birth. Students enter kindergarten on grade level and stay there; they also stay in school because at HCZ it’s not just about getting into college—there’s a full slate of arts, physical education, and enrichment in addition to the three Rs.

"Don’t eliminate the things that make kids love school," Canada said. We have to give kids opportunities to learn how to have fun, or they’ll find whatever way is most readily available—for at-risk students, often drugs or gangs.

Canada speaks from experience, proclaiming, "poetry saved me." As a young man growing up in the South Bronx, it was a teacher’s encouragement that got him reading verse, starting with Dr. Seuss and leading to Langston Hughes.

A small army of people will change the world, Canada concluded. Here in San Antonio, steps from the Alamo, several thousand educators dispatched worldwide is a good start.