An Innovative Program That Could Serve as a Model for At Risk Children

Paul Tough:

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.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 13, 2008 5:33 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas