Geoffrey Canada didn’t come to Chattanooga last week to mince words. He’s spent 14 hard years on the immense challenge and hope of getting 11,000 children from impoverished families in a 100-square-block area of New York City’s notorious Harlem area through college. He knows all the hard obstacles to academic achievement that must be overcome: gangs, drugs, abuse, violence, single young mothers, fatherless homes and a dearth of concern for school work.
So he’s accustomed to getting straight to the point about education: “Failure isn’t acceptable,” he asserts. “Every child can succeed.” You “do what it takes” to make it happen. “Every community can do it.”
He says the formula for his celebrated Harlem Children’s Zone initiative isn’t magic. Perhaps not, but it is extraordinarily rigorous. Perhaps every community “can” do it. But the question is, how many actually will do it?
The odds on failure
Canada clearly knows the odds.