The Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education

The Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is a non-profit organization that funds and operates a neighborhood-based system of education and social services for the children of low-income families in a 100 block area in Harlem, New York.

The HCZ education components include early childhood programs with parenting classes; public charter schools; academic advisors and afterschool programs for students attending regular public schools; and a support system for former HCZ students who have enrolled in college. Health components include a fitness program; asthma management; and a nutrition program. Neighborhood services include organizing tenant associations, one-on-one counseling to families; foster care prevention programs; community centers; and an employment and technology center that teaches job-related skills to teens and adults.

The HCZ has received remarkable media attention, including a best-selling book, Whatever it Takes, and a 60 Minutes feature.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned on replicating the HCZ as the first part of his plan to combat urban poverty:

The philosophy behind the project is simple — if poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence; failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works . . . . And it is working . . . . And if we know it works, there's no reason this program should stop at the end of those blocks in Harlem.

True to his campaign promise, President Obama instituted a Promise Neighborhoods Initiative intended to replicate the HCZ in 20 cities across the country. The program received a $10 million appropriation from Congress in 2010, under which 339 communities applied to the U.S. Department of Education for planning grants to create Promise Neighborhoods. The administration has requested $210 million in new funding for the 2011 budget year to move from planning to implementation.

What is unique and attention-getting about the HCZ is that it is designed on the assumption that it takes both effective, achievement-oriented schools and strong social and community services to support the educational achievement of children in poverty. The presumption is that effective schools alone are insufficient. In this the HCZ and Promise Neighborhoods are aligned with the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, an advocacy position taken by an influential group of proponents of the view that public investment in the communities and society in which children are reared is a necessary condition for education reform.

Does the HCZ Work?

The entire rationale and appeal of the HCZ is its holistic, neighborhood-based approach to the educational achievement of low-income students. With the administration proposing hundreds of millions of dollars of new federal funding for Promise Neighborhoods, with the shape of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act under influence from the Broader, Bolder philosophy, and with the academic future of a generation of poor children on the line, we should ask whether the HCZ works, and whether it works as advertised.

Whether the HCZ works and whether it works as advertised are different questions. Imagine that students who receive the full panoply of HCZ services have superior achievement to similar students who don’t receive those services. We would conclude that the HCZ works. But what if students who received the schools-only component of the HCZ did as well as students who received the full treatment? Then we would have to conclude that the HCZ works, but not as advertised. Under the latter scenario the HCZ would be an exemplar of the very schools-only approach that the Broader, Bolder proponents reject as ineffective.

HCZ works, at least to raise academic achievement among the population of students whose families try to enroll them in HCZ charter schools. Harvard researchers Dobbie and Fryer conducted a study of the HCZ, The Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, that took advantage of a New York City regulation that requires public charter schools to select students by lottery when the demand for slots exceeds supply.

By comparing academic outcomes for lottery winners vs. lottery losers, they were able to create the conditions of a randomized experiment, thus assuring that any differences among the two groups in academic outcomes were due solely to the opportunity for enrollment in the HCZ charter schools. The researchers found very large effects on academic achievement, particularly for math at the end of middle school. They conclude that, “the effects in middle school are enough to reverse the black-white achievement gap in mathematics.”