This is a guest post by Harlem Children’s Zone President and CEO, Geoffrey Canada.
The Harlem Children’s Zone response to the Brookings Institute’s report: “The Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education”
By Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO, Harlem Children’s Zone
With all due respect to the Brookings Institute, we believe that the report by Grover Whitehurst and Michelle Croft is a wrong-headed take on the work of the Harlem Children’s Zone, one which is further compromised by several statistical misrepresentations of our Promise Academy charter school’s test results.
In 2004, the Harlem Children’s Zone opened the Promise Academy charter school with the intention of closing the black-white achievement gap. In just a few short years we have accomplished that. With the American education landscape littered with schools in poor communities that have failed to accomplish this important task for decades, we feel that the Whitehurst and Croft report trivializes what we have done in a relatively short time. This is certainly not a trivial issue to poor children, and particularly to poor children of color, because getting a good education is their only reliable way out of poverty.
The report equates the Harlem Children’s Zone with our Promise Academy public charter school as if they were one and the same. This is inaccurate and misleading. Anyone who has even a basic understanding of our work would realize that the Harlem Children’s Zone is a comprehensive place-based strategy that has a goal of working with all children that reside in our Zone, whether they go to our public charter schools or traditional public schools. Last year we worked with over 8,000 children in the Children’s Zone. The Whitehurst and Croft report looked at only one school – and only the 500-plus students who took the 2007-2009 statewide tests – to make its conclusions about the entire Harlem Children’s Zone.
The Harlem Children’s Zone has one basic goal: to get our children into and through college. We have the same standards for children who go to traditional public schools as we do for those who go to the Promise Academy charter schools. In fact, this fall we are thrilled to have more than 700 of our students in college who went to traditional public high schools and participated in HCZ afterschool programs.
We believe that even the best schools in impoverished neighborhoods would be significantly improved if there were wraparound support services for their students, families and community. If your mission is about all of the students in a community, then dealing with family crises, gangs, drugs, violence, and health all become part of your strategy to support development of the whole child, not just how they perform on standardized tests. When a community becomes too violent or the schools too lousy, families – if they have the means – will move out. Poor families don’t have that option; that is why you need a comprehensive strategy.
Even while misunderstanding the basic premise of the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Whitehurst and Croft analysis has several weaknesses. First, it looks at only one of our charter schools, Promise Academy I. If Whitehurst and Croft had decided to look instead at our other charter school, Promise Academy II, which started with children in kindergarten and first grade, they would have found that Promise Academy II was not in the middle of Bronx and Manhattan charter schools, but in the top quarter. The decision to exclude Promise II students, in our opinion, is a fatal flaw in their report. Second, they do not look at progress of the students over time, which we believe is a better measure of the added value of a school. In contrast, the Harvard University study of our work by researchers Will Dobbie and Dr. Roland Fryer looked at progress over time. The analysis of Dobbie and Fryer showed that Promise Academy middle-school students entered our school with lower scores on average than all black children in New York City. Despite starting out below the average for black students in New York City, the middle school students closed the achievement gap with white students over their first three years. If you take this approach you reach a totally different conclusion: you see highly significant progress with our middle schools students.
There are also several misrepresentations in the report that we are obliged to correct.
1) The report states that the Promise Academy charter-school students who live outside the Zone do not receive the full complement of HCZ services, which is wrong. The report concludes that since there is no difference between the charter school students who live outside the Zone and those who live inside the Zone, the effects of the services are nil. However, all of our public charter school students, regardless of where they live, have access to all of our services. There is no difference because they are not treated differently. These services include free medical, dental and mental-health services; access to social workers and counseling; afterschool tutoring; healthy meals; test prep; college tours; after-school, weekend and summer enrichment classes; and recreational opportunities, among others.
2) The authors give equal weight to each grade without looking at the progress each cohort has made over their time with us. In other words, middle-school students who improved in the school over three years had those accomplishments minimized by averaging their scores.
3) The authors arbitrarily tossed out the achievements of our Promise Academy II charter school. They state they used Promise Academy I because it was “the longest established HCZ public charter school.” In fact, Promise Academy I has been in operation for only one year more than PAII. They also said it would be “confusing” to include both schools, though they included three KIPP schools in their findings. The two cohorts of third and fourth grade tests scores at PAII were the best in our organization. Our own calculations of how Promise Academy II would fare under the authors’ methodology indicate that the school would be in the top quarter among the charter schools they use as comparisons. Leaving them out and then using only PAI’s scores to evaluate the entire Children’s Zone is disingenuous.
4) The report used incorrect demographic data about HCZ’s charter schools. The authors used the Promise Academy I charter school’s reported percentages of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch to compare our students to other “similar” populations. However, the numbers they used do not accurately portray our school population, which is due to our own reporting errors. Because we provide free lunch to all of our students, regardless of income, many parents did not turn in the federal reimbursement forms during our first few years of operation. Though it meant we were losing out on some federal meal reimbursements, we did not push parents to give in the forms. Consequently the public records used by the authors showed Promise Academy I with only 33-52 percent of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch from 2007-2009. After several years in operation, we realized that the subsidized-lunch forms were also being used as evaluation data and that consequently, government officials were considering our population to be wealthier than it actually was. Therefore, we improved our system and we submitted more-accurate data last year to the state that showed we have, in fact, over 80 percent of our children qualifying for free or reduced lunch.
We applaud Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein for bringing the best charter schools in the country here to New York City, and we are thrilled to be part of the charter-school movement, which is bringing the opportunity for a great education to so many children who have not had that chance. However, charter schools are not the only answer. We must improve our traditional public school system since that is where the overwhelming majority of our students are. A crucial part of that effort must be making sure that poor children and families have the support services that so many of us in America have as a matter of course.
The lucid critique of the Brookings Institute report by Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children Zone nips in the bud an effort to once again create a false dichotomy between effort to improve the academic performance of students and the need to address an array of social- emotional and family and community circumstances that research tells us DO influence student performance. Surely we need high quality teachers and engaging instruction, but research also tells us that social supports are also needed for our youth to succeed in school and in life.
The evidence is clear. Students who suffer from health and economic barriers do worse in school. Charles Basch’s recent report, Healthier Students are Better Learners, connects health issues to academic achievement and Paul Barton’s Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress demonstrates similar results.
We can only get these results when youth are provided with the supports they need to learn. No matter how exceptional the curriculum and instruction are, the fact of the matter is that a hungry student will have trouble concentrating (how many adults can accomplish this feat?) and a student with poor vision will not be able to see the chalkboard.
As a country it is time we move beyond the “either- or” arguments if we are to truly address the realities that face our students and families. Community schools are doing this every day to ensure high academic performance. Bailey Elementary – a community school in Providence, RI – boasts an improvement in 3rd grade reading, from 27 % proficiency in 2007 to 41 % in 2009. Providence Public School District’s Superintendent, Tom Brady said, “Teachers can’t do it alone. Unless community organizations begin to address some of the myriad social issues affecting a child’s academic progress, urban schools in particular will never fulfill their promise.”
This type of socially just education reform will move our country in a direction where EVERY student graduates high school ready for college, career, and citizenship. The Coalition (www.communityschools.org) will continue to work closely with the Harlem Children’s Zone to make sure this happens. The Coalition is an alliance of over 150 partners including the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Marty Blank
President of the Institute for Educational Leadership and Director of the Coalition for Community Schools
Comment by Martin J. Blank — July 23, 2010 @ 3:43 pm
The Brookings Institution’s recent report, “The Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” correctly questions the best ways to impact student achievement, but is utterly wrong in its conclusion that: “There is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, and community improvement in general have appreciable effects on student achievement in schools in the U.S.” School-based health care has an impact on student achievement, and deserves a strong federal commitment.
The National Assembly on School-Based Health Care (NASBHC) is the national voice for the nation’s nearly 2000 SBHCs and the children they serve. Founded in 1995 to promote and support the SBHC model, NASBHC’s mission is to improve the health status of children and youth by advancing and advocating for school-based health care. SBHCs provide critical health services directly to students with chronic and acute conditions, like asthma, in order to keep them in the classroom. SBHCs also offer mental health services that focus on improving the student’s emotional health to help them cope with issues such as stress and bullying, and help prevent high-risk behaviors such as drugs and alcohol.
Research increasingly shows that kids who have access to high quality, comprehensive health services in their school often have better academic success:
• A 2009 report issued by the Oregon Department of Human Services Public Health Division found that more than half (53%) of surveyed school-based health clinic (SBHC) users reported they did not miss a class while using the center services, while a majority (75%) estimated they would miss one or more classes if they had to leave their school to access health services.
• A 2010 study in the Journal of School Health by Maureen Van Cura (Vol. 80 pg. 371-377) also found that students not enrolled in an SBHC lost 3 times as much seat time as students enrolled in an SBHC, concluding that: “SBHCs have a direct impact on educational outcomes such as attendance.”
• A 2010 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health by Walter, Kerns, Lyon, Bruns & Cosgrove showed that low-income students with access to SBHCs services – including medical and mental health services – had lower discipline incidents and showed a stronger increase in their GPA than those without access to such services.
• A 2010 study in the Journal of School Health by Jessica Strolin-Goltzman (pg. 153-159) found that access to a SBHC was associated with greater satisfaction among students, parents, and teachers in the areas of academic expectations, communication, and school engagement. The author concludes her study by stating: “Perhaps by helping to eliminate the barriers that affect lower-performing students’ readiness to learn, while improving student and parent engagement, SBHCs can partner with schools to reach their performance and accountability goals.”
In fact, partnerships between SBHCs and schools are part of what make community schools such as the Harlem Children’s Zone so successful. SBHCs are an integral component of the model of community schools that incorporates many elements to help drive the success of its students. Community schools understand the importance of not just addressing the issues within the classroom, but also the issues that kids deal with outside the classroom.
SBHCs work with the schools and the communities in order to promote a more holistic approach to success that has been proven to work in various communities, including the Harlem Children’s Zone community.
NASBHC is proud to be a member of the Coalition for Community Schools, which provides youth development, community planning and development, family support, health and human services, government and philanthropy as well as national, state and local community school networks.
Linda Juszczak
Executive Director
National Assembly on School-Based Health Care
Comment by Linda Juszczak — July 28, 2010 @ 9:49 pm
I am a sociologist whose research interests lie in comprehensive community change initatives (CCIs), social justice and public policy. I am completing a case study of a CCI in New York City with which I worked for about six years. I have spent the last several years reviewing the literature about “what works” when we seek to counter the devastating effects of poverty, as well as the demands that poor and ethnoracial minority urban communities in the US (and elsewhere) face for “rigorous evidence.” Canada’s incisive reply meets Brookings’ demands for rigor (which, ironically, they seem to have neglected in this recent report). However, it also strikes me that Brookings is consistent in upholding a culture of “evidence” that puts CCIs in particular at a disadvantage. Meaningful comprehensive community change takes decades to achieve (not to minimize the very real achievement score gains of the young people mentioned throughout the comments above) and defending a narrow set of definitions of “success” may serve politicians, researchers so trained, and funders quite well, but distracts us from the remarkable knowledge we are building without relying upon quantatative methods. Activists, scholars and practitioners around the globe know that the dominant policy consensus, which organizations like Brookings work to build, serve to reinforce institutionalized norms of rigor that fail to capture equally real increases in community capacity and distract us from more challenging political questions about lasting change in the most burdened communities. I hope the Senate sees fit to restore Promise Neighborhoods funding so that other neighborhoods can work to implement their own plans as successfully as HCZ, and expand the narrow vision of what works.
Comment by Michelle Ronda — July 30, 2010 @ 4:33 pm