Frederica Freyberg:
The model for the Milwaukee Children's Zone comes from New York City, and President Barack Obama wants to see urban school districts across the country copy what's happening in Harlem, happening in a program that catapults formerly-failing students into college graduates. It's called the Harlem Children's Zone. It encompasses a 100-block area in one of New York City's toughest and poorest areas, and includes a charter school, preschool, after-school and even  a baby college for parents to learn how to parent successful kids. Children included in the Harlem Children's Zone have free access to healthcare, mental healthcare and sports and arts programs. The new way of reaching and teaching low-income students is closing the so-called achievement gap for the nearly 10,000 students in the program. This by way of longer school days and longer school years and high standards and accountability for teachers and parents and the students themselves. Its leader is Jeffrey Canada, who was in Madison speaking to Wisconsin educators this week. We had a chance to sit down with Canada during his visit. We started by asking why the Harlem Children's Zone is known as education from cradle to college.  

Jeffrey Canada:
Well, we really believe that in some communities, particularly communities like Harlem, where so many children are under-performing, that you've got to start working with children from birth. We get their parents even before the kids are born, when the mothers are pregnant. We begin to talk to them about brain development and what they need to do about reading to their child and singing and playing and talking with their child so the child really enters school ready to learn, with all of the vocabulary words and the skills necessary to be successful. And we have to stay with those children throughout their academic career. We don't work with a kid for seven, eight years and think it's going to be fine. She's going to do well. We stay with those kids until they graduate high school, get them into college and then we stay with them until they finish college. And we consider success a child who has graduated with a degree. Everything up to that is just sort of leading to success. But this is really about trying to make sure that these kids are able to get jobs, you know, support themselves and their families, break the cycle of generational poverty in Harlem.

Frederica Freyberg:
It sounds fabulous, but the price tag has to be phenomenal.

Jeffrey Canada:
We spend on average $5,000 per year per child. While people think ‘oh, my goodness, and that doesn't include school costs,’ but on these same children in communities like Harlem, we're spending $37,000 a year to lock these kids up. We're spending $200,000 for juvenile detention facilities. Let's make sure we do smart investments for children, give them the kinds of head-starting that allow them to become productive citizens. We're spending huge amounts of money on these same children in bad ways. We say let's spend the money in a positive way instead of waiting until the kids mess up and then spend the money then.

Frederica Freyberg:
How do you spend that $5,000 that you're talking about outside of the actual educational costs in the school?

Jeffrey Canada:
We run after-school. Our schools are open for 11 months a year. They stay open until six. After-school goes until six. We run programs on Saturdays and Sundays. We have great sports programs and arts programs. So we really try to make sure that we cover all the needs of the children, for children, families in crisis, we have a social worker to work with the child and family. We want to make sure that we try and take care of all the basic needs of the children, medical, dental, mental health. By the way, it doesn't produce super-children. Those are the kinds of things middle class children take for granted. Even providing those supports, kids still have to get a great education from great teachers and great leaders. But we shouldn't have to have kids going hungry or being sick or coming from troubled homes where there's violence and expect them to compete with middle class children.

Frederica Freyberg:
So all of this, what kinds of successes have you seen?

Jeffrey Canada:
One of the things that's really exciting for us is that Dr. Roland Fryer of Harvard, a well-established economist, found out that we closed the achievement gap between black and white students in our elementary schools. Even in our middle schools, we closed the gap in math and about half closed it in ELA. This was the first time that he had seen success sizes that large. We've got about 500 children in college. We've got our kids going into kindergarten. One hundred percent of our kids are in kindergarten on grade level. So we're seeing a lot of hopeful signals that this is really working. And I don't think it's an experiment anymore. I think now we have a way of actually turning around poor children in urban communities.

Frederica Freyberg:
Do you have to start at the cradle?

Jeffrey Canada:
We think our best practice is to start at the cradle because we want to have our children compete with middle and upper middle class children. So while we get kids in college, we can't get them into the best colleges unless we start at the cradle. They'll be competing with children across America to get into the best colleges in this country. Kids that we get when they're 13 or 14, we get them through high school, in colleges, but they can't compete for the best colleges with other children because they've just had too many years of poor academic performance to try and make up. So we think our best practice is to get them early, get them on grade level. Those kids are going to be very competitive.

Frederica Freyberg:
You say that you will do whatever it takes. What's an extreme example of that?

Jeffrey Canada:
Well, look, we've had young people that we were trying to get to lose weight because we've got this huge obesity issue, not just in America, but it's really bad in Harlem. I spent years trying to figure out how to solve the obesity problem with no success. Finally I went to my kids and I said, look, if you lose the weight, we're going to have teams, the team that loses the most weight, we're going to send them and their parents to Disney World. Guess what happened? My kids lost weight. There is an answer. The question is, can we do it year after year. We try and think outside the box and do very unorthodox things, sometimes going to the kids and say you solve the problem and if you do, we're going to do something wonderful for you.

Frederica Freyberg:
Can this be replicated in cities like Milwaukee that has a very big problem with an achievement gap and poverty within the confines of a very strong teachers' union?

Jeffrey Canada:
Here's one of the issues. I think the teachers' unions are going to have to confront the fact that if they don't change, they're going to go the way of the UAW, the United Auto Workers. You can't keep producing an inferior product and think Americans aren't going to opt out. I'm old enough to remember when the first Japanese cars, everybody laughed saying Americans will never buy those. But American cars were breaking down. So in the end, to avoid that kind of crisis, I think our teachers' unions are going to have to face the facts. We have to have change. Yes, I think you can get change even in Milwaukee, where the unions are very strong, because there is not an alternative plan to get this done. You've got to use data. You've got to use evaluation. You can't allow lousy teachers in stay in the system with no consequences, where children fail and adults get to keep their jobs. That system doesn't work in Milwaukee, doesn't work in any city in this country. We've got to change that. A lot of us are saying, you've got to be part of the solution. You can no longer be part of the problem.

Frederica Freyberg:
What happens if we don't change these things?

Jeffrey Canada:
I think this very country is in peril. There's a new study that said 75 percent of American young people between 17 and 24 cannot qualify for the military. Seventy-five percent. Black kids, Latino kids. I couldn't believe the number. I had my staff research them. But when you look at, you have to have a high school diploma, you have to be physically fit and you can't have been arrested for a felony, that eliminated 75 percent of all the children in America of military age. We've got a crisis in this country and we've got to come to grips with that crisis and we've got to make sure we're doing really aggressive things to solve this problem in this country.