Briefing On The Harlem Children’s Zone

OCTOBER 2010

Introduction

The Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) has attracted interest in the UK since its founder Geoffrey Canada was invited to speak at the Conservative Party Conference In October 2010. Whilst there he met with Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, to discuss what lessons he thought Britain could learn from HCZ. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Geoffrey Canada stated that he had told Michael Gove that the UK teaching unions were the biggest threat to schools reform. He said that unions constituted an inflexible brake which was “killing” the innovation necessary to transform children’s lives, and that they “cover up” for failing teachers. HCZ schools are not unionised.

This short Briefing outlines the background to the HCZ and summarises the independent research on HCZ that has been carried out by academics.

Background

  • The Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is a not for profit organisation designed to provide neighbourhood based social and educational services for the children of low-income families in Harlem, one of New York City’s poorest areas. It covers a 97-block zone of Harlem and was founded in 1997 by Geoffrey Canada an educational reformer.
  • HCZincludes three charter schools. The organisation’s charter school venture began in 2004 with the opening of PromiseAcademy I elementary and middle schools. Promise Academy II opened in 2005 and the PromiseAcademyHigh School started in 2008.

Funding

  • HCZ schools receive huge amounts of private sector funding. In 2009 the Harlem Children’s Zone had assets of nearly $200 million, and the project’s operating budget in 2010 is $84 million, two-thirds of it comes from private donations. In September 2010, the Goldman Sachs Foundation pledged $20 million toward constructing an additional school building. Gary Cohn, the president off Goldman Sachs sits on the Board of Directors of HCZ along with billionaires, Stanley Druckenmiller and Kenneth Langone.
  • President Obama has instituted a Promise Neighborhoods Initiative intended to replicate the HCZ in 20 cities across the country. The decision to expand the initiative and provide huge amounts of public funding has been criticised due to there being a lack of evidence to support HCZ’s approach of linking social services to promote student achievement.

The Record of HCZ

  • As with other charter schools there is no evidence that the HCZ schools are raising pupil achievement. Over all, 38 per cent of HCZ’s Promise Academy I’s students in third through sixth grade passed the 2010 English test under the state’s new guidelines, placing it in the lower half of charter schools citywide, and below the city’s overall passing rate of 42 per cent.
  • A study by the BrownCenter on Education at Brookings, published in July 2010, sought to evaluate whether HCZ worked as an educational reform model by analysing publicly available data on school performance. The study determined that the HCZ flagship charter school, PromiseAcademy I, was "a middling charter school," compared with other Manhattan and Bronx charters. The researchers concluded: "There is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs and community improvement have appreciable effects on student achievement." The BrownCenter study instead pointed towards a large and growing body of evidence that it is schools themselves that can have significant impacts on student achievement.
  • Charter schools compete to try to get higher test results than regular public schools and thus have an incentive to avoid students that might pull down their scores. Like other charter schools the HCZ schools are able to choose their own students through a school lottery based admissions system. The Promise Academy I, which opened in 2004, should have had a senior class by now but the students that started then, as sixth graders, was dismissed by the board en masse before reaching the ninth grade after it judged the students’ performance too weak to found a high school on.
  • HCZ’s social and educational “cradle to college” services are only provided for a small minority of the 17000 people that HCZ states it serves. This can be seen very early on in a child’s life at age three when the school lottery admissions system separates the children who secure a place at the PromiseAcademy. After that point access to the schools is limited and inconsistent. Whilst the children in HCZ schools receive great health care at the school clinic the coverage does not extend to siblings or families.
  • The HCZ is facing opposition to its proposals to build another charter school in Harlem. The PromiseAcademy would be built in the St Nicholas public housing projects. InSeptember 2010 TheNew York Postreported that hundreds of residents from the St. Nicholas housing projectshad signed petitions urging the federal government to reject City Hall's plan to start construction on the new school. Residents state they have not been properly consulted on the proposals which would displace a large children's playground and two community gardens.
  • There is a concern that the HCZPromiseAcademywill not be for the children that live in St Nicholas housing but for the pick and choose charter mentality. The school would be funded with $60 million in public funds and $40 million raised privately. Residents have asked why the City would not put the same funding into local public schools rather than creating a new building for a charter school.

.