How Children Stop Failing

It takes a village to raise a school.

By Sara Mosle
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008, at 6:49 AM ET

Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes is an inspirational story about one man's efforts to boost educational achievement in New York City's Harlem. The book is also a sobering tale of how such good intentions, alone, are often not enough. Put the two together, and you have everything you need to know not only about inner-city education, poverty, and charter schools but about the realism that is essential to ambitious reform.

For five years, Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine (where I once worked), followed Geoffrey Canada's efforts to launch a multimillion-dollar initiative, the Harlem Children's Zone. The Zone refers to a 97-block area that Canada has blanketed with social services and equipped with an elementary school and junior high, both charters within the New York public school system. Canada grew up desperately poor in the South Bronx and was a student radical in the 1960s. For years, he ran a successful nonprofit that provided the usual scattershot offerings to similarly poor families in Upper Manhattan. His goal for the Zone is on a totally different scale. Instead of trying to reach the lucky few and extricate them from the ghetto, he wants to reach all children (and their families) where they live, in every aspect of their lives, in order to boost student achievement across the board.