Minnesota Public Radio airing of Geoffrey Canada

View the webcast of Geoffrey Canada at Minnesota Meeting.

Geoffrey Canada addresses the crowd at Minnesota Meeting

recent Minnesota Meeting, everyone in the room was on the edge of their seats.  With a renowned model of success at the Harlem Children’s Zone all were anxious to hear his advice and he did not waste any time mincing words.

“If you care about your children, you’re going to have to save them yourselves.  No one is coming in to rescue Minnesota’s children.  If you don’t do it, it will not get done.”

He laid out six critical principles that he has adopted and believes are applicable to educational reform in Minnesota:

• Begin early.  Only by beginning with early childhood education and intervention can we keep students from falling behind so far, so fast that they’ll never catch up.
• No one program idea is powerful enough to do the job.  Create a continuity of best practices that help kids in school and in the community successfully achieve the next stage of progress, all the way through college.  Canada pointed out a constant continuum of support is needed.  His program believes that to tackle only one issue while everything else in a child’s universe is crumbling is a failed strategy.
• Parents have to be involved and engaged, especially for the most vulnerable children.  Canada said he was unapologetic for programs in HCZ that provided economic incentives for parents to get involved in school activities, saying the focus needs to be on what the children need.
• Schools must be redesigned for success.  He said, “You’ve got to invest in a longer school day and a longer school year” to help children keep pace with competition elsewhere.  He said we need to hold teachers accountable but also “pay teachers like they’re professionals.”
• Communities need to support young people in an atmosphere with clean parks and playgrounds and an absence of violence.
• Evaluate and measure each and every step.  He encouraged getting student testing data turned around fast enough to allow for meaningful intervention for struggling students.

Guests at Minnesota Meeting

He recognized the many challenges of dealing with an educational system that he views is in a state of crises.  It requires an ability to make long-term fixes while treating the emergency at your door.

Canada closed with an original poem which illustrated his personal story in which poetry served as the hook to keep him engaged in education while growing up poor in the Bronx.  He said, “We don’t know what will save a child.  For some it will be music, for others it will be drawing.  Our job is to provide a variety of real opportunities for kids to allow them to find the things that will save them.”

Minnesota Meeting Guests

The written word does not do justice for Canada’s talk.  He is a highly entertaining and engaging speaker full of stories to illustrate his incredibly work.  I hope to have a webcast of his talk posted soon!

Check out the fact sheet distributed at the meeting.

We are expecting a full house to hear from Geoffrey Canada at the next Minnesota Meeting. Check back here next week for an update on the discussion.

Those are the words of Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone.

Among the leading social entrepreneurs of our time, Geoffrey Canada has taken Harlem Children’s Zone from a one block pilot program in 1990 to a 100 block comprehensive service provider with the goal of serving 15,000 children and 7,000 adults by 2011.  A product of poverty himself and raised by a single mother, he went on to receive a Master’s degree in Education from Harvard and take on the fight against generational poverty.

Harlem Children’s Zone’s programming begins with expectant parents and follows children through college graduation.  Their approach includes parenting education, charter schools, nutrition and fitness education and career readiness.  For the community they also provide financial and legal services and initiatives to help families cope with asthma and combat obesity.  The goal is to provide such a strong a net of services that it is impossible for anyone to fall through the cracks.

I am thrilled that Geoffrey Canada will be the next speaker at Minnesota Meeting.  This session will explore how Minnesota might integrate lessons learned from the Harlem Children’s Zone model.  To ensure the success of all students, regardless of race or income, and to provide them with meaningful opportunities, we need more than strong schools.  We need all sectors of our communities working together to support student success.

Click here for a New York Times in-depth article on Geoffrey Canada and Harlem Children’s Zone.

At the same moment, two trains leave Chicago and New York. They move towards each other with constant speeds. The train from Chicago is moving at speed of 40 miles per hour, and the train from New York is moving at speed of 60 miles per hour. The distance between Chicago and New York is 1000 miles. How long after their departure will they meet?

For some of us (well, at least me) this question sends us right back to middle school math class and we shudder at the memories. For others, these word problems are a fun challenge. At the next Minnesota Meeting we will talk about how to get kids excited and stay interested in math and sciences.  In particular, Are there barriers to girls and boys of all races and all socio-economic levels participating in and excelling in these topics?

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Mae Jemison, has had fascinating experiences in math and science. She is the first African American female to travel in space. Her academic career included attending Stanford at the age of 16. Trained as a doctor, she worked in private practice and for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Dr. Jemison is also an accomplished dancer and has the honor of being the first real astronaut to appear on Star Trek.

Dr. Mae Jemison

Among these many talents, Dr. Jemison is an outstanding speaker and will address the issue of preparing students for the changing demands of the workplace. An academic foundation in math and science is increasingly important, as economic forecasts project 20-33% increase in scientific and technical occupations in Minnesota in ten years. In addition, Dr. Eric Jolly, president of the Science Museum of Minnesota will lead an interactive discussion with local students about their classroom experiences with math and science.

We hope you’ll join us. Click here for more information on Minnesota Meeting and registration.

I do, in fact, know the answer to the problem above.  Post your answer and we’ll see if you are right!

Ironically, this is what new teachers experience on their first day.  They enter a classroom filled with our community’s most important clients: students.

After the Minnesota Meeting event on Closing the Opportunity Gap (see Raising Expectations: Strategies for Reform post), about 40 practitioners convened to continue the dialogue around teacher quality and raising expectations. Creating and retaining high quality teachers kept floating to the top, with professional development as a key strategy. Let’s compare teaching, for a moment, to the financial industry. Setting out on a career as a financial advisor, you wouldn’t begin with the largest or most challenging clients. You might shadow another advisor for a while. Or perhaps you’d start with a small client list, take training classes, and work your way up as you master skills and demonstrate progress. Not so for teachers.

Dr. Rudy Crew spoke passionately about the need to create a system to support first and second year teachers. There is an assumption that they will just catch on. Yet, according to Crew, emerging teachers don’t have the “repertoire” of teaching strategies necessary to reach the diversity of student needs in their classroom.  In addition, most teachers that early on in their career are also only given a one year contract; creating a short window of time to “figure it out.”

A quest for mentorship, a desire for professional development opportunities, a need to develop a depth of skills, are common topics of conversation among my peers, regardless of the specific profession or field.  It is important for all “young” professionals to have a support system to guide them on their career path.

Peter Hutchinson, Kati Haycock and Rudy Crew discuss the issue of teacher quality.

Today, over 600 people attended the first Minnesota Meeting.  It was the first in a three-part series on education titled Raising Expectations.  I was incredibly excited to have many of you join us at At The Table.   I think that all in attendance were both moved and alarmed by the cold, hard facts about the state of Minnesota education laid out by the speakers.  The panel included Kati Haycock president of the Education Trust, and Dr. Rudy Crew, former superintendent of New York City and Miami/Dade Public Schools.  The panel was moderated by Peter Hutchinson, President of the Bush Foundation and a former Minneapolis Public Schools superintendent.

Haycock started things off with some concrete data. “On state assessments in reading, about 80 percent of your white 4th graders meet the state standards.  For black 4th graders it’s more like 44 percent, for Latino’s about 33 percent and somewhere in the mid-50’s for both Asian and native American students.”

Perhaps most alarming, Haycock said is that for students entering the system behind grade level, the education system actually widens the gap, rather than closing it.  She stressed two fundamental factors to addressing the gap – quality teachers and a rigorous curriculum.  She said, we need to raise our expectations of all students and provide the teaching to support it.

Dr. Crew, a passionate speaker with a professional history as a reformer (including being named Superintendent of the Year in 2008 and being fired from the position in the same year) laid out three primary points.

1. Raise expectations of kids, teachers, schools and governance of the school system.
2. Teachers need to cultivate a deep understanding of effective and varied teaching approaches.  He referred to this as the development of a teaching repertoire.
3. Demonstrate a “high degree of human caring,” which, he said should be evident at the board, the district, and the classroom levels, as well as in how a community spends its dollars.

Both speakers agreed that the allocation – not necessarily the amount – of dollars is critical to closing the achievement gap. Poor students simply get less – “not less in terms of dollars but in terms of what a dollar buys,” said Haycock. Crew spoke bluntly: advocating for increased funding without demanding results deters change. He said many states, including Minnesota, have “put in more money to get the same results….Good leaders need you to push for results and back their efforts for reform.”

Both speakers identified a need for better board governance, better data, and above all, more support and accountability for teaching.  Crew commented that it isn’t about intention.  No one enters the teaching profession without wanting to make a difference, but with little, if any professional support, many beginning teachers don’t know “what an A looks like,” in teaching. He advocates introducing a master-teacher approach to allow for greater compensation for and knowledge sharing by effective teachers.

Haycock who often commented on the need for measurement and data to prove what is effective and what simply doesn’t work, talked about the  need to evaluate teaching, based not on student achievement but on student growth. Teachers need to demonstrate their “value added” for students; standardized tests measure student performance as opposed to student progress.

Hutchinson also added to the conversation by saying, “We can’t compete in the global economy by falling behind in educational achievement. Over a third of our young people who go on to college are taking remedial courses when they get there – essentially taking high school over again.

Throughout the meeting the audience could be seen taking notes, nodding in agreement to the ideas of reform, and gasping in response facts like Minnesota’s academic place nationally.

So, now how do we move beyond the chairs of the convention center to take steps towards reform?

If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch it here.

Also, here is a brief fact sheet that was distributed and a MinnPost article.