Harlem's Education Experiment Gone Right

For years, educators have tried and failed to get poor kids from the inner city to do just as well in school as kids from America's more affluent suburbs. Black kids still routinely score well below white kids on national standardized tests.

But a man named Geoffrey Canada may have figured out a way to close that racial achievement gap. What he's doing has been called one of the most ambitious social experiments to alleviate poverty of our lifetime. His laboratory is a 97-block neighborhood in Harlem, which he has flooded with a wide array of social, medical and educational services available for free to the 10,000 children who live there. It is called the "Harlem Children's Zone."

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Ed Bradley first reported on Canada three and a half years ago, but back then there was no way to tell if his Children's Zone was working.

Today, however, results are in and they are nothing short of stunning, so much so that the White House is now taking notice.

For Geoffrey Canada however, it is just a start.

"You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie,'" Canada told CNN's Anderson Cooper.

"So you're trying to level the playing field between kids here in Harlem and middle class kids in a suburb?" Cooper asked.

"That's exactly what we think we have to do," Canada said. "You know, if you grow up in a community where your schools are inferior, where the sounds of gunshots are a common thing, where you spend your time and energy not thinking about algebra or geometry, but about how not to get beat up, or not to get shot, or not to get raped, when you grow up like that, you don't have the same opportunity as other children growing up. And we're trying to change those odds."

He's trying to change those odds on a scale never before attempted. His goal: to break the cycle of poverty in an entire neighborhood by making sure all the kids who live there go to college.

"You really believe that's possible, to break that cycle?" Cooper asked.

"I absolutely know we're gonna do it," Canada replied.

Canada remembers well what it was like to be a kid in the inner city. He grew up not far from Harlem in another tough New York neighborhood, the South Bronx.

Abandoned by his father, he and his three brothers were raised by their mother, who was barely able to get by.

"When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my mother about it. And she was like, 'No, no, no. There's no Superman.' And I started crying. I really thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming," he remembered.

A teenager, his grandparents moved to the suburbs and he went with them. He got into Bowdoin College and then the Harvard School of Education.

He's been working with kids in Harlem virtually ever since.

"You know, one of the first things kids ask me when they really get to know me, they say, 'Mr. Canada,' I say 'Yes sir.' 'Are you rich?' And I say, 'Yeah, I am.' And they're so excited, because they think I finally know somebody who has power. What they really want to ask is, 'Is there any way that you can help me figure out how to get a nice car and maybe get a house?' And I think they want someone to say 'Yes, you can.' I got out, you can get out. There's a way. And I'm gonna help you do that."

To do it, Canada decided to build his own school in the Children's Zone. Right now there are some 1,200 kids enrolled from Kindergarten through the tenth grade. It'll eventually expand all the way through the 12th grade.

It's a charter school, so Canada is able to run it his way, free from the bureaucracy and restrictions of the public school system: there's one adult for every six students, classes are smaller and school days longer. Kids come in on Saturdays and summer vacation that only lasts three weeks.

Discipline is strict and so is the dress code. To teach kids healthy eating habits, there are cooking classes using ingredients from the school's own organic garden.

And if any of the kids get sick, this on-site clinic provides free medical, mental health and even dental care. Canada calls his school the "Promise Academy," and this is what he tells parents at the start of each year:

"We promise our families if your children are with us, we guarantee they're going to get into college and we're going to stick with them through college, right? So that's a promise," Canada said.

Asked how he can actually promise that they will go to college, Canada told Cooper, "If my kids don't go to college, people who work for me are losing their jobs. And there's just no way around that."

"You'll fire the teachers," Cooper remarked.

"I will fire the teachers. I'll fire the after school workers. I'll fire the directors. Everybody understands that this thing is our job as the adults. And we're not gonna hold the kids responsible, right? And are some of my kids belligerent? Yes. Do some of 'em come in and don't try hard? Yes, they do. Do they come from broken homes? Yes. Is there poverty and drugs and crime? Yes, it's all those things. Those kids are still going to college," Canada said.

Richar Anozier wasn't too sure about college when Ed Bradley first met him back in 2005. He was just in Kindergarten.

"You want to go to college?" Bradley asked.

"Much as it kills me, yes," Anozier replied.

Asked why it would kill him to go to college, Anozier told Bradley, "Because they got people, words that I don't know."

"But you'll learn new words every year. Trust me, you'll be okay," Bradley said.

"Okay," Anozier replied.

Today, Anozier is in the fifth grade and seems a lot more confident about college. He wants to go to Stanford and wants to earn his way to being a CEO.

Asked why he wants to become a CEO, he told Cooper, "To tell you the truth, I think you get paid better when you're the CEO."

To make sure his kids succeed, Canada will do just about anything. For the younger kids who ace their statewide tests, there are free trips. And he pays high schoolers up to $120 a month if they get near perfect attendance and grades.

"Aren't you kind of basically bribing them?" Cooper asked.

"I love to bribe kids," Canada said, laughing. "People say, 'Well, Geoff, don't you want kids to do it for the intrinsic value of ed?' Sure, I'd love them to do it for the intrinsic value. And until then, I'd love them to do it for money. I don't care. I just want 'em to do it."

Tuition at the Promise Academy is free, but there's not enough room for all the kids who live in the zone. So admission is by lottery.

This August, we watched as anxious parents waited to hear if their children would get in. There were 210 slots open for a new Kindergarten class, but 375 kids had applied.

As the slots filled up, some parents left waiting began to realize their child's chances of success in life had just been reduced.

There were a lot of very angry parents. "And they were accusing me, right, 'Geoff, how could you do this to a three-year-old?' 'This is not right, Geoff.' And I would say, 'No, no, you're right, it's not right,'" Canada said.

"You look into those mothers' eyes and those fathers' eyes and you see the fear and the terror and the clear understanding that the system is designed so that their kids are probably not going to make it if they don't get in," Canada added.

To help ensure that the kids who don't get in still make it to college, Canada has created a pipeline of free programs targeting all 10,000 children in the zone. He sends recruiters out door to door, trying to sell sometimes suspicious families on what services he's offering.

Canada's pipeline begins at birth, at the baby college, a nine-week workshop that teaches new mothers and fathers how to parent.

It also teaches them how to prepare their kids for elementary school. For toddlers, there are free pre-Kindergarten classes that focus on developing language skills, even in French and Spanish.

Canada has also put reading labs in public elementary schools in the zone, and created an SAT tutoring center for teens. Ninety percent of the zone's public high school students who participated in Canada's after-school programs now go on to college.

None of this comes cheap, however: the Children's Zone annual budget is $76 million, two thirds of which comes from the private sector, and much of that from Wall Street. It comes to about $5,000 per child per year.

"Yeah, it's a lot of money. Until you see what it costs us when we fail these kids in New York City jail $60,000 a year," Canada pointed out. "Juvenile detention, $100,000 plus a year. We're spending the money on these kids and we're not getting anything in return."

Canada has long argued investing in the Harlem Children's Zone would show a return and now, for the first time, there's scientific data to prove it.

Dr. Roland Fryer is a professor in the economics department at Harvard. He has conducted the first independent, statistical study of Canada's efforts to close the racial achievement gap in his school.

Asked what the racial achievement gap is, Dr. Fryer explained, "Black kids in our schools are not performing at even close the rate as white children in our schools. The average black 17-year-old reads at the proficiency of the average white 13-year-old. Four year difference in effective reading skills. That's huge."

But when Dr. Fryer analyzed four years' worth of Promise Academy test scores, he discovered something remarkable.

"At the elementary school level, he closed the achievement gap in both subjects, math and reading," Fryer explained.

"Actually eliminating the gap in elementary school?" Cooper asked.

"We've never seen anything like that. Absolutely eliminating the gap. The gap is gone, and that is absolutely incredible," Fryer said.

Last year, according to New York State data, 100 percent of Canada's third graders scored at or above grade level in math, narrowly outperforming their white peers in the city's public schools.

Even more impressive, Canada's impact on middle schoolers, kids who enrolled in the Promise Academy in the sixth grade. They started out far behind grade level, but Fryer found that within three years they had virtually eliminated the achievement gap in math, and reduced it by nearly half in reading.

"These are kids that a lot of people had given up on. And he showed that it's never too late," Fryer said.

Asked if it changes the way he looks at the problem, Fryer told Cooper, "It does. Because here's an analogy. We're ten touchdowns down in the fourth quarter. We kick a field goal and everyone celebrates, right? That's kind of useless. We're still 67 points down."

"You're still losing," Cooper remarked.

"Okay. We're not just losin'. We're gettin' crushed. All right? What Geoff Canada has shown is that we can actually win the game," Fryer said.

Canada may be winning, but he's nowhere near declaring victory.

"Reversing the black-white achievement gap and then closing it in elementary school, that's huge," Cooper pointed out.

"It's about an hour's worth of celebration huge," Canada replied. "You know, I've got kids who might be shot tomorrow. We've still got a lot of work to do before I can feel comfortable that they're all gonna be okay."

According to Canada, four kids in the Children's Zone were shot to death this past year; four others were wounded.

Canada says there has been an uptick in violence.

And the economic crisis has hit Canada hard as well: donations are down and he's laid off staff. His endowment also lost $4 million to Bernie Madoff.

"We have basically written that money off. It's basically gone," Canada said.

But Canada's experiment did receive a boost earlier this year when President Obama announced plans to create 20 "Promise Neighborhoods" across the country, modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone.

"If the Harlem's Children's Zone can turn around neighborhoods in New York, then why not Detroit or San Antonio or Los Angeles?" President Obama asked.

There are other charter schools getting similar positive results, but replicating the Harlem Children's Zone In its entirety may be difficult in part because it's hard to determine exactly which ingredient is the key to Canada's success.

"I feel like I've gone to a phenomenal French restaurant, the dish tastes good, but I'm not sure exactly what they did to do it," Roland Fryer told Cooper.

"He's doing so many different things," Cooper replied. "He's got this all hands on deck approach."

"He does, he does," Fryer said. "And I think the key step forward from here is that we need to kind of demystify the success. I wanna boil him down to pill form so I can transport him to other places. Because if folks say, 'Well, this is just Geoff Canada. This is just Harlem. And this is just a special deal,' they're less likely to adopt it in Omaha and places like Minnesota."

"So, how will you measure success? How will you know when the Children's Zone has worked?" Cooper asked.

"When I see my kids by the thousands with degrees. I will say this is what we set out to do, and we've done it," Canada said. "We've got our kids in the best schools in America. They're gonna be successful. They'll be competing with everybody else all over the country. People will be lookin' for kids from Harlem sayin', 'Oh, those kids are so great from Harlem, we need more kids from Harlem to come in. Then, we'll be successful.'"

Produced by Tanya Simon