Since the Harlem Children’s Zone began in the 1990s, dozens of cities around the country have attempted to mimic its programs and strategies for breaking the cycle of poverty through education. In 2010, St. Paul joined the list with its own “Promise Neighborhood.” The effort was spearheaded, in part, by City Council Member Melvin Carter, who now chairs the group’s board. The Hechinger Report spoke with Carter to find out more about the efforts to improve some of St. Paul’s troubled neighborhoods and schools.
Q: How did St. Paul’s Promise Neighborhood start?
A: We are really recognizing, right now the Twin Cities metro area has the highest achievement gap of any major metropolitan area. We also, not coincidentally, have the highest unemployment disparities of any major metropolitan area. We’re recognizing that all of these disparities aren’t really anything we can substantially address working in isolation, but we really have to find ways to break that cycle wherever we can. The Promise Neighborhood is a critical component in that. It’s a 250-square-block area of our city, mostly what are called the Frogtown and Summit University neighborhoods. It’s an area that has a high percentage of people of color, particularly African Americans and Hmong Americans. We’ve identified two public elementary schools right in the heart of both of those neighborhoods. They were really saying, drawing upon success of the Harlem Children’s Zone, let’s build a 360-degree, no-excuse approach to closing the achievement gap and making sure these young people in this community have every opportunity to achieve their full potential.
Q: What makes your Promise Neighborhood unique?
A: We literally started with the city government and [the mayor and I] went to our school districts and … to our county and saying, ‘These are all the reasons why we pay property taxes in the first place. This is something that local government has to lead in order to be able to do it at scale.’ We have a nonprofit anchor partner that we actually selected together and went to. Whereas most of the Promise Neighborhoods around the country started with this nonprofit organization that had an idea and went to try and get the buy-in, we started with the buy-in and went to try to figure out what nonprofit organization was going to make the most sense to host it in. While we have pockets of success all around the country, the real problem is nobody knows how to do this at scale. We think we have the opportunity to really demonstrate – even more so than anyone else – how this kind of work can be done successfully at scale.
With the Promise Neighborhood right now, we applied for the federal grant. Despite getting glowing feedback and excellent scores from the reviewers, we didn’t get funded. So moving forward we’re going to be focused on three things. One is high quality and affordable early education. The second piece that we’re really focused on is out-of-school learning time that’s integrated with the in-school learning time. That’s the obvious recognition that students don’t stop learning when the bell rings at 3 o’clock. We have built a robust set of free and affordable afterschool programs. The third piece is family supports. The goal of this third piece is really high-quality parent engagement in this work so that we can have not just a partnership with parents but a push from parents to continue moving it forward.
Q: Five years from now, what would you like to see education look like in the neighborhood and around the city?
A: I’ve gotten to know [Harlem Children’s Zone founder] Geoffrey Canada somewhat well, well enough to consider him something of mentor in this work. The first time I ever met him, his bottom line message to us was, “It’s the adults; it’s not the children.” The children are all kind of born with infinite possibilities, with infinite ability to succeed and achieve. When an 8-year-old fails second grade, it’s really never because of the 8-year-old. It might be because the parent didn’t get him to school. It might because of the teacher. It’s because there has been some breakdown with the adults around him. The first challenge is making sure all the adults really open up our imaginations and really understand that these children – no matter what we’re looking at at 6 and 7 years old – these children really can be the next generation of doctors and lawyers and teachers and everything else. We actually need them to be.
We’ve got metrics that we’re looking for. Obviously I’d love to get us to the point where we can boast like Harlem Children’s Zone that every child in this neighborhood is ready for kindergarten, that every child goes to third grade ready to make that switch from learning to read to reading to learn. Those are critically important. Some of the things that are just as important from a qualitative perspective are just the attitude and the way that we approach education, which is harder to measure and even harder to define.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.
St. Paul’s Promise Neighborhood
The Promise Neighborhood sounds to me like the only kind of program that will realistically address that education gap. We must bring in all aspects of a child’s life before we can begin to get these kids reading and learning. As Carter says, if a child is failing, it goes back to the family. It isn’t his fault.
I live in Carter’s neighborhood and I’m so pleased he is taking on this essential and comprehensive job. I briefly tutored at the Obama Service Learning Elementary School. The only kids I worked with were those that needed extra help, but I could see a little bit in reading with them and a few conversations why they needed help. One day a child that I was not working with sat up against a locker with his hood over his head for the whole time, clearly upset, grieving, depressed–who knows what might have happened in his home–and the tutor and teacher wisely, in my opinion, just left him alone for the time being. A friend of mine who also tutored spent weeks with a boy who never once spoke to her. Who knows what was happening in his life. Most of the children were just reading, below level, spelling out the words, and showing no signs of enjoying reading or even necessarily comprehending what they were reading. How could they enjoy something they were struggling with?
Good for you, Melvin Carter III. Keep at it. We desperately need this.
So Obvious
How to create real hope and change: First, get an good education (this will require firing at least 10%-20% of the inadequate teachers). Second, delay sex and/or have less partners (more sex = higher chance of parenthood). Third, delay parenthood until at least 25. Fourth, get a job, any job. Work hard. Be responsible and respectful. Lastly, don’t paint yourself a victim…yes life is hard and unfair, but most everyone holds at least part of the solution to improving his or her own life. Government can’t save the people from their own bad decisions just like a parent can’t save his/her own children from their willful wanderings. If all of these fail and you find yourself down on your luck…abort…otherwise your kid will repeat the cycle.
Three cheers for this program
It recognizes that the achievement gap is not the result of prejudice or discrimination. It primarily goes back to the family, and the severe handicap so many African-American children have. They come from fatherless homes; homes without computers; homes where English is poorly spoken.
Things like early education and after school programs should be a big help. This is a really large problem with fundamental underpinnings. It will take major efforts like this one to deal with it.
Mr Bracken has some good points, but merely preaching won’t cut it.