July 11, 2010 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Each year thousands of parents enter their children in a lottery in New York that will, to a great extent, determine their future. The lottery is required under state law for entrance into oversubscribed charter schools, including those operated in conjunction with the nationally acclaimed Harlem Children’s Zone.
For the winners, it is a time for cheering and joy. But for many more, it is a time of frustration, anger, and sadness. Mystified children who were not selected are bundled up and shuttled off, not understanding that a piece of their future has just been taken away.
“This is very hard for me to see,” said Geoffrey Canada, chief executive of Harlem Children’s Zone, in an interview with the author Paul Tough for his book, Whatever It Takes. “People are just desperate to get their kids into a decent school. And they just can’t believe it isn’t going to happen.”
Wiping away a tear, he continued, “These parents really get it. They understand that if the school is good, the odds that your child is going to have a good life just increases exponentially. So they now just feel, ‘Well, there go my child’s chances.’”
It is a sad story. And it is one that is about to be repeated nationwide, this time for many thousands of children.
Hundreds of communities are now competing for federal support to create their own Harlem Children’s Zone—and given the amount of money available, the odds of success are even steeper than they are for the parents in Harlem.
The reasons everyone wants a share of the money are obvious: Studies show that the Harlem Children’s Zone approach works.
Started in 1997 as a project of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, Harlem Children’s Zone runs an interconnected network of social programs for an estimated 10,000 children in New York City. Its goal is to provide a quality education coupled with comprehensive support services to every child in a 100-block area in Harlem.
Unlike other programs that focus on solving one or two specific social problems, Harlem Children’s Zone thinks about everything a child needs, linking education with social services such as family counseling, health care, and after-school programs. It does not seek to rescue a few children from poverty; it seeks to transform all the youngsters in the neighborhood and, in the process, transform the entire neighborhood.
The results have been impressive. Several studies, including one in 2009 by the Harvard economists Roland Fryer Jr. and Will Dobbie, have shown that the nonprofit group’s work has closed the achievement gap between students in low-income communities and their middle-class contemporaries.
Such success drew the attention of Barack Obama, who pledged during his presidential campaign to spread the Harlem Children’s Zone to 20 neighborhoods across the nation, eventually devoting billions of dollars per year to the effort. Called Promise Neighborhoods, that effort is now under way. The Department of Education has pledged that by September, it will name up to 20 organizations to receive grants worth as much as $500,000 each to plan how they would create their local versions of the Harlem Children’s Zone. In 2011 they will be able to apply for money to carry out the plans.
The excitement generated by Promise Neighborhoods has been enormous. But with the money so limited, only about 2 percent of the community coalitions that originally said they would apply will get any money. Like the parents and children who were not lucky enough to win a place in the New York charter-school lottery, hundreds of communities will be forced to watch as their neighborhoods and children are left behind.
The competitive nature of the process is understandable. The Obama administration must select the communities most likely to succeed with the limited resources at hand.
But knowing that will provide little consolation to those not selected. We must give those communities hope.
The Obama administration is aware of this. Behind the scenes, it is now putting in place a quiet revolution in government that will, if fully realized, make the hopes of these communities a reality.
Promise Neighborhoods itself is actually part of a much larger package of administration efforts that seek to transform neighborhoods. One is Choice Neighborhoods, a Housing and Urban Development program that aims not just to improve public housing but also to link it to education and social services, including those provided in Promise Neighborhoods. The administration is also busily readying other programs at a range of federal agencies.
This focus on neighborhoods is itself part of a much larger Obama administration effort to overhaul government programs that has stressed several common themes. These include:
Focusing on innovation. The administration is driving innovation at all levels of government and at nonprofit groups. For example, its Investing in Innovation program is awarding $650-million to promising efforts to improve education, and the Social Innovation Fund is offering $50-million to help spread innovative nonprofit efforts with proven results.
Requiring foundations and other donors to get involved. To a greater extent than any other, the Obama administration has shaped its programs with involvement from traditional big foundations as well as the newer generation of philanthropists who are often more willing to be daring and experimental.
Forcing organizations to compete. The administration is asking more organizations to apply for money, moving away from the common federal approach of creating a formula and giving money to anybody who meets specific standards.
Rewarding organizations that can back up their commitments with data and evidence. The administration is increasingly giving extra priority in awarding money to organizations and programs that use approaches with proven results. In addition, it is supporting new efforts to focus on performance measurement.
Making government transparent. The administration’s support of open government does not appear to be lip service. Centralized in the White House Open Government Initiative, the administration’s emphasis on transparency is a key part of its larger focus on accountability and results.
The administration’s approach is based on an understanding that in these cash-strapped times, the future of Promise Neighborhoods and other programs like it lies not in the ability to persuade Congress to enact significant new spending increases. Rather, it lies in a revolution that will substantially transform existing government programs and, in the process, much of the nonprofit world.
Unfortunately, very few people know about the Obama efforts, and the changes will not come fast enough. The administration must do a better job articulating its vision so that communities have hope. And Congress must act to make changes to existing federal programs.
In the meantime, the clock is ticking. In September hundreds of communities that have applied to become Promise Neighborhoods will be disappointed and wonder what to do next for their children. For them, the line between hope and despair is very thin. For lessons, we need only look back to those heartbreaking scenes from New York’s charter-school lotteries.
No children should watch as others celebrate a future they will not share. Let’s not do the same thing to whole communities.
