by Paul Tough
There were two other Harlem Children's Zone board members at the lottery: Mitchell Kurz, the treasurer, who had retired early from a successful career as an advertising executive to become a high school math teacher in the South Bronx, and Kenneth Langone, a wealthy investor who had helped found Home Depot and now served as the chair of Promise Academy's board of trustees. Canada had invited the three men up to Harlem to witness what he had hoped would be a celebration, the culmination of months of hard work behind the scenes. But as the crowd swelled, he began to get an uneasy feeling about the way the evening might turn out. He knew that for half these parents, the night would indeed be celebratory, full of hope and promise. But the others, he realized, were going to leave disappointed. There was no requirement for charter schools to hold their lotteries in public; legally, Canada could have drawn the names behind closed doors and simply mailed out acceptance letters. But he had decided to make it a big show. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now he wasn't so sure.
"COULD I HAVE everyone's attention?"
Canada had mounted the stage, and he stood behind a lectern, leaning over the microphone. The room was loud, a steady din of chatter pierced by an occasional wail from a child, and Canada waited for the noise to recede. On a long table next to him, a gold drum held a jumble of index cards, each one printed with the name of a prospective student.
Canada had turned fifty-two the previous January. When he joined Rheedlen, two decades earlier, as the organization's educational director, he carried an intimidating physique, a broad chest and thick biceps, the legacy of an adolescence spent in schoolyard brawls followed by years of black belt training in karate. Now, in middle age, he still had the look of an athlete, but he had grown leaner with the years, tall and rangy, his arms long and his wrists narrow. His hair was going gray, and he wore it shaved close to his scalp. A sparse mustache and goatee, also graying, framed his mouth. These days, Canada divided his time between the streets of Harlem and the boardrooms of corporate America, and when you looked at him you could see the two sides of his personality reflected. Tonight, as always, his downtown uniform was flawless: his dress shirt was monogrammed and his cuff links were gold. But there was something about the smooth, loping way he moved—or even now, the way he stood curled over the lectern—that was straight from the streets of the South Bronx.
When the hum in the auditorium died down, Canada began. "We are calling our school Promise Academy because we are making a promise to all of our parents," he said. "If your child is in our school, we will guarantee that child succeeds. There will be no excuses. We're not going to say, 'The child failed because they came from a home with only one parent.' We're not going to say, 'The child failed because they're new immigrants into the country.' If your child gets into our school, that child is going to succeed." The curriculum at Promise Academy would be intense, he said: classes would run from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., five days a week, an hour and a half longer than regular city schools. Afterschool programs would run until 6:00 P.M., and the school year would continue well into July. There would be brand-new facilities, healthy lunches, a committed staff. "If you work with us as parents, we are going to do everything—and I mean everything—to see that your child gets a good education," Canada said. "We're going to have the best-quality education that parents can imagine."
From their narrow wooden seats, the parents watched Canada and considered the promises he was making. It was a complicated time to be raising a school-age child in Harlem. For as long as anyone could remember, the neighborhood's public schools had been uneven at best and downright dangerous at worst. Parents traded rumors about a promising new principal or a decent after-school program, but their options had always been limited: Catholic school, if you could afford the tuition, or whatever the city was offering. In recent years, though, Harlem had become home to a growing number of educational alternatives: small, narrowly focused academies, selective public schools, and brand-new charters. The new schools meant more possibilities, but also more risk: how were you supposed to know which promises to believe?
For some in the auditorium, the choice was obvious: they had decided on Promise Academy the moment they heard it was opening. There were forty children currently enrolled in Harlem Gems, the Harlem Children's Zone's prekindergarten program, and all forty of them had entered the lottery for the Promise Academy kindergarten. Yasmin Scott was one of the true believers. She was here with her daughter, Yanice Gillis, who was about to turn five. About a year earlier, an outreach worker had stopped Scott on the street and invited her to attend Baby College, the Harlem Children's Zone parenting program. Scott signed up. She was young when she had Yanice, just fifteen, and she felt like she needed all the help she could get. For Scott, Baby College turned out to be a great experience—nine Saturdays in a row, four or five hours a day, discussing immunization schedules and asthma prevention and the importance of reading and singing to your baby. The discipline classes, especially, were real eye openers, where she learned about time-outs and alternatives to corporal punishment. After Scott graduated from Baby College, she wanted more, so she enrolled Yanice in Harlem Gems, an all-day pre-K with a 4:1 child-to-adult ratio. After half a year in the program, Yanice was shining, learning the basics of reading and math, singing songs in French, coming home armed with words like "astronomy" and "meteorologist." Scott hoped Promise Academy would mean more of the same. She couldn't stand the thought of sending Yanice to a regular Harlem public school after this.
In the second row, right next to the aisle, Wilma Jure sat wearing an "I Love New York" T-shirt and a red nylon jacket, her head bowed in an anxious prayer. Jure wasn't here for her own child. She was praying for her niece, Jaylene Fonseca, a four-year-old who was a classmate of Yanice's in Harlem Gems. Jaylene's mother, Jure's sister, was living in the city's shelter system for homeless families, and most nights, Jaylene slept with her mother in a shelter on Forty-first Street, then spent the day in Harlem Gems. Jure sometimes felt that the Gems program was the only thing keeping Jaylene alive.
In the front row, Virainia Utley sat with her daughter Janiqua. Utley was something of a model parent in the Harlem Children's Zone. Janiqua was in the Fifth Grade Institute, an academic club that the organization ran here at PS 242, and her three younger siblings—Jaquan, Janisha, and John—were all enrolled in the afterschool computer-assisted reading program. Utley was the vice president of her tenants' association, which was part of Community Pride, the Harlem Children's Zone's community-organizing division, and she was a regular presence at Zone events. She had been talking for months about Janiqua going to Promise Academy.
Onstage, Ken Langone, the board member, was reaching into a plastic bucket filled with ticket stubs. As at many Harlem Children's Zone events, one of the lures Canada had used to pack the house tonight was a raffle. Langone, an owlish, balding man in his late sixties, read the winning numbers into the microphone like he was calling a church bingo night, and one by one, parents came to the front to display their tickets and collect a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate from Old Navy, the Gap, or HMV, the music store. The winners looked happy, and there was mild applause for each one, but the audience was beginning to grow a little restless, and the noise level was rising again. It was approaching 7:00 P.M., and not a single child's name had been called.
But Canada still wasn't quite ready to spin the drum. He called up one last guest: Rev. Alfonso Wyatt, a friend of Canada's since the early 1980s and now a minister on the staff of the Greater Allen Cathedral in Queens. Wyatt was on the school's board of trustees along with Langone and Druckenmiller and Kurz, but not because of his fundraising acumen. He was there for less tangible reasons—a moral authority, maybe, or maybe it was just that unlike the businessmen, all of whom were white, Wyatt shared a culture and a history with Canada: the peculiar joys and sorrows of inner-city black activism in the post–civil rights era. Wyatt and Canada were a decade or two younger than the men who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr., the gen
eration that now made up the nation's civil rights establishment; their perspective was shaped not by Selma and the March on Washington but by what followed: Black Power and busing riots, drugs and AIDS and hip-hop.
Wyatt pulled the microphone from its holder and walked to the front of the stage. He wore a white turtleneck under a dark suit jacket, a modified version of a clerical collar. A stylized cross hung around his neck. "Some people don't believe that there are folks in Harlem who really care about their children," he began, his voice a sonorous baritone, his cadence deliberate, straight from the pulpit. "They don't believe that on a day when it was raining all day, that they would come out and that they would sit and that they would wait. People don't believe that there are folks who don't mind being inconvenienced." As he warmed up, the attention of the crowd, which had been wandering, was pulled back to the front of the auditorium. "But I know that the people here in this room don't mind waiting. Because if they can wait a little while tonight, they can change their children's life over the long while." Wyatt began pacing the stage, and suddenly even the people who did mind waiting didn't mind waiting. "So I want to salute you," he said. "We're going to show people all over the world that with a good staff, with dedication, with teamwork, that we can turn out first-rate scholars" There was a loud burst of applause. "Oh, you better clap," Wyatt continued. "We're not cutting no corners. We're going to do this." He pulled out one of his favorite stories, one he often used in front of a crowd like this one. "I want to tell you something that maybe you don't know," he said, his voice rising. "The people who run prisons in this country are looking at our third-graders. They look at their test scores each year to begin to predict how many prison cells will be needed twenty years from now." Some scattered murmurs of disapproval were heard. "And so I want the people in this house to tell them: You will not have our children!" The applause was louder now, a Sunday-morning feel on a wet Tuesday night.
"Let me hear somebody say it," Wyatt called out, and he led the crowd in a chant: "You! Will! Not! Have! Our! Children!"
"Let me hear somebody else say it," Wyatt cried, and the parents shouted again, louder:
"You! Will! Not! Have! Our! Children!"
"Let's make some noise in this place!"
AND THEN THE drawing began, starting with the kindergarten class. Doreen Land, the academy's newly hired superintendent, read the first name into a microphone: "Dijon Brinnard." A whoop went up from the back of the auditorium, and a jubilant mother started edging her way out of her row, proudly clutching the hand of her four-year-old son. Land smiled and took the next card: "Kasim-Seann Cisse." Another whoop, some applause, and then, a few seconds later, "Yanice Gillis." Yasmin Scott clapped her hands and leapt to her feet.
At the front of the auditorium, Canada congratulated each mother (or, occasionally, father) and child. Proud parents shook his hand and introduced their children, beaming on their way back to their seats. In the front row, Wilma Jure was praying harder than ever, her eyes shut tight, her lips moving, reciting one supplication after another. And then Land read out, "Jaylene Fonseca," and Jure's eyes flew open, and the next thing she knew, she was on her feet, hugging Canada, tears brimming in her eyes, and then running out of the auditorium to call her sister with the good news.
As the evening wore on, though, the mood in the auditorium started to shift. The kindergarten lottery ended, the chosen students trooped out to the cafeteria for a group photo, and the sixth-grade lottery began. In the front row, Virainia Utley sat with her daughter Janiqua, listening to the names and trying not to worry. But the lottery numbers were rising—fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six—and Janiqua hadn't yet been called.
After Land read out the one hundredth name, Canada took the stage again and explained to Utley and the other remaining parents that it wasn't likely there would be room for their children in the sixth grade. Land would read out the rest of the names and put them on a waiting list, he said, but this part wouldn't be much fun. He encouraged everyone to go home. Land went back to reading names, and Utley and Janiqua sat and listened, still in their seats, as the waiting list grew and the number of cards in the drum dwindled. By the time Land got to the eightieth place on the waiting list, they were just waiting to make sure Janiqua's name was called. Maybe her card got lost or stuck to another card.
The room was thinning out, and the only remaining parents were angry ones. They were lining up to let Canada know how they felt. One by one, the parents came up to him to find out what could be done to get their children into the school, and he had to tell each one the same thing: nothing. Nothing could be done. One disappointed woman spat out her complaint to anyone who would listen. "I think it's not fair, and I want someone to know," she said, her voice loud and bitter. "It's very unfair. Drag people out and they sit here all day, half their night is gone—they can't cook dinner, they can't do nothing—because they said that our child's going to get in here, and then our child don't get in here. But we're still sitting here, waiting to do what? On a wait list? It's not fair, and I don't like it."
Finally, at number 111 on the waiting list, Janiqua Utley's name was called, and her mother rose, took her by the hand, and started up the aisle to the back door.
AS WORKERS BEGAN sweeping up coffee cups and deflated balloons, I sat down next to Canada in the front row of the auditorium, off to the side. I had by this point been reporting on his work for almost a year, following him to meetings and speeches and events around the city. But I had never seen him look so exhausted; he was overwhelmed, it seemed, not only by the emotion of the evening but also by the enormity of the task ahead of him.
"I was trying to get folks to leave and not to hang around to be the last kid called," he said. "This is very hard for me to see. It's very, very sad. People are desperate to get their kids into a decent school. And they just can't believe that it's not going to happen." His eyes were watery, and as we talked he dabbed periodically at his nose with his folded-up handkerchief. "These parents really get it," he said. "They understand that if the school is good, the odds that your child is going to have a good life just increase exponentially. So now they just feel, 'Well, there go my child's chances.'"
Canada often spoke of a "competition" that was going on in New York City, and by extension in the nation, between the children he called "my kids," the thousands of children who were growing up in Harlem in poverty, and the kids living below 110th Street, mostly white, mostly well off, with advantages visible and invisible that shadowed them wherever they went. The divisions between these two populations had grown more stark than ever. The average white family in Manhattan with children under five now had an annual income of $284,000, while their black counterparts made an average of $31,000. Growing up in New York wasn't just an uneven playing field anymore. It was like two separate sporting events.
"For me," Canada said, "the big question in America is: Are we going to try to make this country a true meritocracy? Or will we forever have a class of people in America who essentially won't be able to compete, because the game is fixed against them?" Canada's voice sounded raspy and solemn. "There's just no way that in good conscience we can allow poverty to remain the dividing line between success and failure in this country, where if you're born poor in a community like this one, you stay poor. We have to even that out. We ought to give these kids a chance."
The creation of the Harlem Children's Zone had brought Canada to a strange new moment in his life. He had known since he was a child that this was the work he wanted to do. In college, he was a political activist, and he led angry demonstrations against the injustices that he and other black students saw on campus and in the nation. He went to work as a teacher after graduation, and for thirty years now he had been a passionate advocate for children. It was a very emotional business he was in, and the approach that he and many of his peers had always taken was an intensely personal one: if you could reach one child, touch one life, your work was worthwhile. But the old way of doing things wasn't working
for Canada anymore, or at least it wasn't working fast enough. He had seen it happen over and over: you reach one child and ten more slip past you, into crime or substance abuse or just ignorance and indolence, menial jobs, long stretches of unemployment, missed child-support payments. Saving a few no longer felt like enough.
"We're not interested in saving a hundred kids," Canada told me. "Even three hundred kids. Even a thousand kids to me is not going to do it. We want to be able to talk about how you save kids by the tens of thousands, because that's how we're losing them. We're losing kids by the tens of thousands."
In starting the Harlem Children's Zone, Canada was asking a new set of questions: What would it take to change the lives of poor children not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in a programmatic, standardized way that could be applied broadly and replicated nationwide? Was there a science to it, a formula you could find? Which variables in a child's life did you need to change, and which ones could you leave as they were? How many more hours of school would be required? How early in a child's life did you need to begin? How much did the parents have to do? How much would it all cost?
The questions had led Canada into uncharted territory. His new approach was bold, even grandiose: to transform every aspect of the environment that poor children were growing up in; to change the way their families raised them and the way their schools taught them as well as the character of the neighborhood that surrounded them. But Canada had come to believe that it was not only the best way to solve the relentless problem of poverty in America; it was the only way. Across the country, policymakers, philanthropists, and social scientists were carefully watching the system that Canada was building in Harlem. The evidence that he was trying to create, they knew, had the potential to reshape completely the way that Americans thought about poverty.