What education needs: More Geoffrey Canada ... fewer leftist American indoctrinators

In 1990, Canada formed the Harlem Children’s Zone, a massive social experiment that set out to change the way poor black kids are raised, read to, spoken to, even fed. In 1997, the Zone started a program encompassing 24 blocks; in 2007, it was expanded to cover almost 100 blocks. It involves both charter schools and public schools. Canada has appeared on “Oprah” and “60 Minutes,” and his results are impressive. …

What is striking about Canada’s breakthrough is that it has the potential to push past the Left-Right divide over education. The Left’s view is summarized in Jonathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities. Kozol is a sad-sacked geyser of left-wing condescension, and his books and lectures are long laundry lists of rat-infested schools with collapsing infrastructure. But Kozol has little to say about the crisis of bad parenting in both the black and white communities or about how teachers have moved away from teaching that life is an incredible, exciting adventure and instead seem only to understand it as something to survive, usually as an aggrieved victim. On the other side is libertarian Charles Murray, who has written a lot about education, but who thinks that IQ is destiny, despite the fact that IQ appears to be at least somewhat malleable and improve if a child is read to from a young age.

Once, in the New York Times, Geoffrey Canada summed up his philosophy: “For me, this is not an intellectual debate. This is quite literally about saving young lives. For parents in devastated neighborhoods such as Harlem, the decision to send their child to the local failure factory or a successful charter school is no choice.”

It takes both a village and good parents to raise a child.