NewsForward From This Moment published Column for CNN: What do you expect of black students? Publishers Weekly Review of Before I Forget CNN interview on newspapers Books Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood Before I Forget (March, 2009) - Fiction Forward From This Moment (August, 2009) - Collected columns Book Reviews Cape Cod Times 4/5/09 Publishers Weekly 4/20/09 _________________________________________________________________________________________ Columns Recent columns can be found on the Miami Herald website at http://www.miamiherald.com/leonard_pitts/ What Works columns (see below for more information) Past columns not included in the special collections above are available for a small charge from the Miami Herald archives at http://www.miamiherald.com/archives __________ Dear Reader: "What Works" is a series of columns profiling people and programs that are attacking the problems of poverty, miseducation, fatherlessness, violence and self-esteem among African-American young people - and getting results. You can read all about it at www.herald.com. On this page, you'll find helpful links and additional information about the various people and programs. What Works Column #2, Jan. 29, 2007 (The Harlem Children's Zone) To learn more about the Harlem Children's Zone, visit their website at: www.hcz.org HCZ founder Geoffrey Canada was profiled in 2004 by The New York Times Magazine. To read the story Video Feature Leonard Travels to Niger, Africa Interviews and Commentary
Interview about 9/11 column, 2008 Brief Interview on The Art of Storytelling, 2008
Unpublished Excerpts from my interview with Geoffrey Canada Q: Would it be fair to say that the main difference between you and other people who were toiling in this same vineyard is that you just got frustrated enough to say, I've got to rethink this? A: "I was failing! I was failing! Look: I have always thought I was good at my job. I really did. I am not falsely modest or anything. I always thought I was good at my job. But at the end of the day, when you say what the sum impact of your work has been, it has been like, things are worse of the kids. That is hard to admit. Yeah, it was frustration, but I think it was a more hard, honest look at my agency's effectiveness and saying, even though we could claim to save kids - we were, we had our numbers - by and large, we weren't accomplishing our mission. We just had to quit pretending. Q: Can what you're doing be done in the Delta of Mississippi? In Chicago? In South-Central Los Angeles? A: Our model is an urban model. It's not that it wouldn't work in the Delta. But you'd have to have folks who can translate our community building strategy. I do believe you've got to get a core group of adults who are engaged in creating an environment for young people. I don't think we can all work on the young people and leave the adults alone. And that's a different model in rural communities where you don't have people concentrated in areas. So let me speak most directly to other urban communities: the Baltimores, the Detroits, the Chicagos, the South-Centrals. Those are the big cities. And then there's 10,000 smaller communities none of us ever hear about that have the same deal going on. Here are the big challenges: The first is, we think you start this at birth. This is really about intervening very early on with parents, with children. And you continue it until kids graduate from college. So that as a mission is a bigger mission than lots of organizations have as their own individual mission. My mission might be to prevent teen pregnancy or I might do early childhood. But we're saying to communities, You can do early childhood. That's great. But who do you hand your children off to when you're done? How do you make sure that you leverage all that energy, time and money that you put into that child when they're 5, 6 and 7?' How is it we insure that these investments actually work? That to me is a challenge. It's complicated, but it's not as complicated as solving breast cancer or prostate cancer or any of the other things that scientists are working on around the world. There's no excuse that we haven't been able to figure out how to do this. This just a matter of will. We have to sit down and figure out, Where do my kids come from and where do my kids go? I'm doing good intervention for these kids, but that's not enough. If I simply turn these kids back over to their environment, they're going to lose the progress they made with me, so I've got to make sure they go into another positive environment. In lots of places, they don't have that positive environment. Doesn't exist. Great early childhood, but nothing for kids who are 6, 7 and 8. We've got to create those."
Q. Where are you on No Child Left Behind? A: I think there's a structural problem with education in this country. I don't think education works for working and middle class parents very well anymore. It didn't have to when you had all these other jobs you could get that you didn't have to have a college degree. But we've never designed our educational system where 80, 70, 60 percent of our kids assumed they were going to go to college. That never was the issue. People think about the good old days. There never was any good old days. In middle class communities, there's a certain expectation that kids will go to college. In poor communities, there is not. In the most wealthy communities, there is an overwhelming belief - but they very rarely use the public schools - that the kid is going to go to college. But they know that to do that, I don't care it's a wealthy community, I still have to send my kid to a prep school to make sure it happens. So I think that we've missed the boat. When we look at who we're competing with, they have a longer school year, they have a longer school day, and they're cleaning our clocks. I'm not talking about poor African- American kids. I'm talking about American kids at large."
Q: When they read my column and read about all of the free services the HCZ offers poor people in Harlem, many of my more conservative readers are going to send me letters saying this program fosters a welfare mentality and dependence and what you really need to do is tell the poor to be independent, self-reliant, pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Your response? A: That's a good point. First, I make a purely, this-is-in-our-best-economic-interests argument. We know right now that if you are incarcerated in New York City, we spend somewhere around $75-$80,000 a year per person. In the state, it's, $62,000. There are 60 thousand African American men locked up in New York state. The numbers are staggering. We've got blocks that we spend a million dollars just in that one block on incarcerated folk. So here, someone's yelling at me because I'm spending $3500 a year on 'Alfred.' 'Alfred' is 8. Okay, Alfred turns 18. No one thinks anything about locking him up for 10 years at $60,000 a year. No one. The conservative people aren't saying, Well, that's a big waste of our money. I think that just on the basis of getting these kids prepared to be part of the labor market, the money we spend on emergency health care, special education, foster care and incarceration is huge on these same families. If we can divert these kids from those costly public systems, I think we've done the public a real service. The second issue is, whatever you think about the adults and their ability to provide for themselves, I think it would be a real mistake to say that a child should sit in a classroom with a toothache and learn nothing because we haven't figured out a way to get that cavity filled. Or that - asthma is the number one reason for school absences in Harlem - children with asthma should be allowed to continue missing school. For people who worry that our kids are being 'given' things, we're not trying to give our kids any more than you would find in any middle class home in America. We're not saying we want that, plus a whole bunch. We just think that's the floor, not the ceiling. When people begin to say kids shouldn't even have just a floor, they shouldn't have their basic needs met, I think that's a mistake.
Note: The HCZ offers a "Practitioner's Institute" to teach its methods and strategies. You cannot participate as an individual. The service is offered only to stakeholder groups representing communities - preferably those with funding mechanisms already in place.
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