Ah, to live in D.C. & be able to attend events like the Brookings gig Diama writes about, below. (And yes, this could technically be a Comment, but then it’d be buried & relegated to the place where only Micah & Diama venture….) Since we’re NOT in D.C., we need to listen in on webinars & do a lot of reading. What I’m reading right now is a book called “Whatever it Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America” by Paul Tough. I’m only about halfway through, but it’s pretty clear that Canada’s particular poverty reduction strategy involves building an extremely dense safety net of services to support children even before they’re born and as they age, in addition to supporting their parents. It’s very similar to the strategy Tulsa Initiative envisions, although Canada has build his net in a defined geographic area which is called the Harlem Children’s Zone. This means he wants to capture everyone in the Zone. Our work, in contrast, will focus (at least initially) on children (and their families) that enroll in CAP’s early childhood programs. Each strategy brings a different degree of difficulty and implies a different likelihood of success. The big takeaway from the book for me at this point, however, is the enormity of the task and the layers of challenges that stand before us.
Poverty Reduction Strategies
September 30, 2008 by Monica
Posted in Horizontal and Vertical Grids, Intergenerational Poverty | Tagged Harlem Children's Zone | 3 Comments
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I saw a review of that book and had been thinking about picking it up. HCZ is a great concept that Barack Obama is proposing to replicate in 20 cities across the country, should he win the election. I’d hope someone in Congress would get behind it regardless of who wins, especially because I think Tulsa would be well positioned for such a challenge.
I’d love to read your thoughts on the cooperative challenges faced by Geoffrey Canada. How has HCZ succeeded in linking children into such a broad array of services?
I ran across the HCZ website yesterday when I was checking out the EdLab partners. I’ve also been seeing references to the book in a lot of articles I’ve run across. This American Life did a great piece on it. You can find it at
http://www.hcz.org/press/this_american_life_v2.mp3.
It’s about 30 minutes. Since I don’t have time right now to read the book right now, this was a nice intro.
The radio piece gives a glimpse on how HCZ has succeeded in linking the children and parents to their services, specifically “Baby College.” A lot has to do with geography and their committment to seeing the children all the way through high school. Canada talks about a “conveyor belt” process where the children are started at birth and parents attend “Baby College” and learn skills to effectively parent and teach at home. Great emphasis is placed on language skills and reading every night to their babies. Studies are finding a correlation between higher test scores and exposing infants to more vocabulary. I think the stat was that kids by the age of 3 that do better are exposed to something like 20 million more words than kids that don’t do as well. Kids of welfare parents only hear 10 million words by the age of 3. Kids of middle class parents hear 20 million and kids of higher income hear 30 million.
Esther Janzen of the LA Times did a good editorial on the infant literacy topic and can be found here http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-jantzen15-2008may15,0,1635045.story?track=ntothtml.
Alright this is turning into much more than a comment. Basically, listen to the This American Life piece.
Yeah vocab exposure is huge in the early years. A lot of parents don’t fully appreciate the importance of just TALKING to their kids at this young age. I think many think they won’t understand it anyway so why bother. And when they do it’s this “baby talk” when really what the child needs to hear is real, natural, intelligent conversation.
Someone made the point once that they see parents talking on their cell phone when they pick up their kids from our cites at the end of the day. But if they just hung up the phone and talked to their kids about their day, that can have a huge impact not just emotionally but cognitively as well.