Book: Whatever It Takes

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Geoffrey Canada wants to save all the children. In the Harlem Children’s Zone, a “97-block-laboratory in Central Harlem,” the Harlem Children’s Zone programs run from Baby College through high school, providing effective (and expensive) support to parents and children with the goal of changing the lives of poor children. Canada’s vision goes beyond the Harlem Children’s Zone, to the hope of creating a model that can be replicated in other neighborhoods, other cities, other places where class and race conspire to defeat families and destroy the hopes of children.

Paul Tough covered the Harlem Children’s Zone for the New York Times. this book provides an admiring — but not hagiographic — portrait of Canada and a clear-eyed look at the successes and the failures of his project.

But Tough goes beyond the Harlem Children’s Zone to summarize the national debate on race, poverty and education, with particular attention to competing views published since the 1960s. He identifies two competing explanations:

One explanation blames powerful social and economic forces beyond the control of any individual. This belief holds that it is the very structure of the American economy that denies poor people sufficient income, and so the appropriate and just solution is to counter those economic forces by providing the poor with what they lack: food, housing, and money. The opposing explanation for American poverty is that it is caused by the bad decisions of poor people themselves and often perpetuated by the very programs designed to help relieve its effects. I fthis theory is correct, what the poor need is not handouts but moral guidance and strict rules.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James S. Coleman, Charles Murray, William Julius Wilson … Tough reviews the reports, and then asks the right questions.

In some ways, the verdict is still out on the Harlem Children’s Zone and whether it can truly transform the culture of poverty in a community. Even if it does, larger questions about cost and replication remain. The questions take on new significance in view of the campaign statements that Barack Obama made in 2007:

If he were elected president, Obama went on to say, “the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in twenty cities across the country.”

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