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.

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.