>>Geoffrey Canada: So good morning. I'm really
excited to be here. I was really intimidated when the German came up. So I'm glad I wasn't
the only one. I saw some other folks who weren't singing
quite as loud. I am in a very interesting position. It seems
as though almost everybody is listening to me. Some of you are saying, I am not listening.
I don't know who you are. Almost everybody is listening to me. But I don't think anybody
is really hearing what I'm saying. And this is very fascinating to me, because it was
a long time when I felt no one was listening to me; right? And I was yelling about stuff
and screaming, and no one -- Then suddenly it looked like everybody was paying attention
to me. But, yet, I really don't think anyone is hearing what I'm saying.
So let me just start off by showing you why I think everybody is listening to me. But
hold this in mind. Everybody is listening. I don't think anyone's paying attention to
what I'm saying. Let me just ask if they could roll some clips of, I think, folks listening
and understanding what we're trying to do. [ Video ]
>>> Ed Bradley first reported on Geoffrey Canada three and a half years ago. But back
then, there was no way to tell if his Children's Zone was working. Today, however, results
are in, and they're nothing short of stunning. >>> Dr. Roland Fryer is at professor in the
Economics Department at Harvard. He's conducted the first independent statistical study of
Geoffrey Canada's efforts to close the racial achievement gap in his school.
>>Roland Fryer: The elementary school, he closed the achievement gap in both subjects,
math and reading. >>> Actually eliminating the gap in the elementary
schools? >>Roland Fryer: Absolutely. We've never seen
anything like that. Absolutely eliminating the gap.
>>> Exhibit A, the Zone's Promise Academy Charter School.
>>> So these are our fourth graders. >>> This year's fourth-grade class is special.
It's the first class where all the kids have been in the Zone's pipeline since birth.
>>Bill Clinton: The Harlem Children's Zone, which is a great example of Geoffrey Canada
organizing a comprehensive way to give those poor kids in Harlem a chance to wind up and
be David Letterman or Bill Clinton someday, or be great doctors or scientists, by dealing
with all the various challenges they have. So if somebody gives money or time to the
Harlem Children's Zone, they know that they're going to get a high rate of return.
>>Geoffrey Canada: All I have to do is push the "send" button. I have just tweeted my
first tweet ever right here on the show. [ Cheers and applause ]
>>Geoffrey Canada: One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me superman
did not exist. I was a comic-book reader. And I read comic books. I loved them, because
even in the depths of the ghetto, you just thought he's coming. I just don't know when.
Because he always shows up and he saves all the good people and they never end up -- maybe
I was in the fourth grade, fifth. My mother, I was like, mom, you think superman -- she's
like, superman is not real. I was like, he's not? What do you mean, he's not? No, he's
not real. And she thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying
because there's no one coming with enough power to save us. I'm less concerned about
the sort of culture wars around this conservative or liberal. I want the kids to be able to
read. The kids can't read. No matter what's in the textbooks, if kids can't read, who
really cares? My theory is, let's give kids a great education. Let's get them to college.
>>Stephen Colbert: I'll bite. Why -- why is it important for underprivileged children
to succeed? [ Laughter ]
>>Stephen Colbert: Spin your scenario. >>Geoffrey Canada: It is absolutely critical
if our country is going to remain number one. You know, America is not number one or number
two or even in the top ten or even in the top 15 when it comes to reading and math and
English -- >>> How do you measure success?
>>Geoffrey Canada: It is measured for us in a very straightforward way: How many of our
children come back with college degrees. >>Ed Bradley: You ever hear those people who
say, you know, this is crazy, you can't do it, and think that maybe you bit off too much?
>>Geoffrey Canada: As long as I am here, we're going to push this envelope as hard and as
far as possible. And I think that in the end, it's going to be important that we demonstrate
that we can get even the toughest kids to make it in America.
[ Applause ] >>Oprah Winfrey: Please welcome Geoffrey Canada.
Really. I just want to kiss you. MMMMA. Just want to kiss you.
[ Video concludes. ] [ Applause ]
>>Geoffrey Canada: But remember what I said, now. So you do Oprah, you do 60 Minutes twice,
you know, every news, Time magazine, one of the top 100 most influential people in the
world, I put it up for my wife, right. She still doesn't believe it. It doesn't move
her at all. I thought that with all of this attention,
that people would really get what I was talking about. But people really have not gotten that.
And before I explain that, I have to tell you one short story about 60 Minutes, right?
So the second time I did 60 Minutes, with Anderson Cooper, and I was talking about the
challenges -- the area I work in in New York City is called Harlem. It's 100%, essentially,
minority, poor kids who live in that area. And if you look at how kids perform in New
York state, Harlem is always at the bottom of the list.
And so I was talking to some of my team about the fact that two groups of kids were shooting
handguns at one another who lived in a housing project. So this is these tall housing projects,
concentrated poverty. And kids were shooting from one roof to the next roof. And we had
a playground right between the two buildings where our kids were playing at. And my staff
was really demoralized, because folks were shooting. And I was saying to Anderson Cooper,
look, when things really get tough, leaders have to show up; right? That's when you have
to go right to where the heart of the problem is. And so I said to Anderson that I was going
to go George Khaldun, who's from my team. We were going to go right into the projects
and tell our staff, we're not giving up this territory, right? These are our kids. No one's
going to drive us out. And Anderson says, "That's great. Let's film
it." Now, I have to raise a lot of money; right?
And all I could think about when Anderson said, "Let's film it," was, please, God, don't
let them kill Anderson Cooper in Harlem; right? Because I'm thinking, if they kill Anderson
Cooper, America's going to hate me. They love Anderson Cooper. And this guy has been to
every battle zone in the world and come back safely. So we got there, we filmed it. It
was fine. If you want to know why I don't think anyone
is listening, people keep think that I am trying to save some poor kids in Harlem. I'm
actually trying to save our country. If you begin to see what's happening in the
United States -- people keep thinking this is a small, isolated problem. It is not small,
and the problem is not isolated. Indeed, we have this huge problem in our country
that there are huge numbers of kids who are not being prepared for the labor market. And
it's happening all over the country. You can see it the clearest when you look at poor
kids who happen to be of color, African American, Latino kids. But this is going on across our
country, and I don't think anyone is really paying attention to this.
You know, the reason I'm so concerned about this is that I have watched our country have
another crisis that people knew about and did absolutely nothing about it.
My -- The chair of my board of trustees is a person named Stan Druckenmiller, who actually
just had a full page feature in the Wall Street Journal talking about the whole issue of how
we're dealing with the deficit and whether or not, you know, we should allow the United
States to default in order to get some real reforms in this country.
But Stan showed me in 2006, this is before the financial collapse, he showed me what
was happening in our country in relationship to housing.
The data was clear, and it was unambiguous. People were borrowing huge amounts of money.
There was no way they were going to pay that money back. Everybody was refinancing. The
housing market was this huge speculative bubble. And it was going to burst. And the data was
clear exactly when that was going to happen, because everybody had taken out these loans,
they were interest-only loans. You could see it across the country, by city, by state,
how many loans we're taking out and when these loans were going to become due. And he just
showed me this disaster about to happen. So I'm looking at this data. I'm not an economist,
I'm not in business. And it is clear and unambiguous to me. And I say to him, "So if you know this,
why isn't anybody doing anything?" And he said, look, I'm going, I'm going to
talk to the Fed. So he goes, talks to the folks in the Fed. Then he says -- nothing
happened. So he says, we've got to go to the Congress. So he actually asked me to set up
a meeting with a senator, which I did. And we went in and laid out the data. It was
clear what was going to happen to our country. No one did a thing.
So this concept that people talk about, that all this happened, people didn't know, it's
not true. People knew. They did nothing. So I'm looking at another crisis for our country.
Huge numbers of kids not getting an education, huge. It's going to overwhelm our system.
And, again, I have this feeling that while you're talking to people, no one is paying
any attention to this, and no one is taking this thing seriously.
So you say, well, how bad is this? Well, we've had a very short-sighted investment
policy in the United States. We know exactly where kids are failing. We
have decided, we're not going to necessarily educate those kids. And when the guys can't
get jobs, we're simply going to make sure that there's enough jails to lock these folk
up. It's pretty unambiguous. And it is amazing to me, the United States
has the highest incarceration rate in the world. So -- bar none. And if you think about
-- So, let's see, where is the U.K.? The U.K. is number 92. Right? So 92. Essentially, you're
locking up, in the U.K., about 150 people per 100,000 folk.
You know what the United States is? 743 people per 100,000.
The closest one next to us, that's off by over 200 people per 100,000, that's Russia.
You think of the worst place in the world, what is the most repressive, backwards place?
They are not even close to locking up folk the way we are. It is costing our country
a fortune. And then you mentioned Rikers Island. It's the largest penal colony in the world;
right? In the world. 14,000 people in Rikers Island. 14,000, right
in New York City. Out of that 14,000, you are going to probably
get 13,000 are going to be African American and Latino; right? You are going to get probably
999 white Americans, and one French guy. [ Laughter ]
>>Geoffrey Canada: Right? [ Applause ]
>>Geoffrey Canada: I will tell you, I'm sure someone is thinking, "I bet he didn't know
he was going to end up here." It is a strategy that's going to essentially
take our country, stop our growth, and essentially have us go backwards.
Now, I know some folks are thinking, Geoff, that sounds pretty rough. The minority population
is not getting an education. Closing this achievement gap is really a crisis. But it
can't be that bad. You're talking about the whole nation not being able -- Oh, you know
what people aren't dealing with? They're not dealing with the new census numbers. People
haven't looked at the census numbers, and what's happening here in the United States;
all right? So a number of us thought -- because people
have been talking about the United States was mostly a white country, it's now becoming
increasingly a more diverse country. It's happening at rate that most people simply
don't understand. And the latest census data has made that somewhat clearer.
In 1970, the United States was 83% white. If you look today, that number is 64%. And
by 2040, the -- that's just around the corner -- the United States is going to have a majority
minority population. And if you want to see what this looks like
and why I say that we are not preparing our nation to be successful, you just have to
track what's happening in terms of this issue of diversity in our country.
Now, if you look in 1990, there essentially were only about 7% of the counties, these
are counties, in America who are minority. So about 7%. So the red means it's a majority
minority and the orange means it's at a tipping point, that it's getting close to changing
over. So then if you look at 2000, you begin to
see what happens. You go to 2010, you go to 2020, you go to 2030. And just look at what's
going on in country. Now, if you know anything about the United
States, you know where the density of our population is.
And by the time you get to 2040, that's America. That's America. That's who going to be our
doctors, our engineers, our lawyers, our business folk. That's who it is. And if we aren't preparing
this group for leadership, then I don't know how we expect our country to remain a great
country. And by the way, these same trends are happening
in most places in the world. And the challenge is people keep making, when
they are hearing me and I am on TV, they keep thinking I am talking about those poor black
folks, the small part -- This is what's happening to our country and we have got to do something
about this. So we decided that we were going to have to
figure out a strategy that was going to close the achievement gap between black and white
students, and it was pretty straightforward. There are essentially five main components
to what we are trying to do. The first was we decided we had to rebuild a central community;
that we had to go into places that were literally falling apart. The urban centers that were
filled with graffiti and trash and abandoned buildings, we had to clean that stuff up,
and we had to get the adults to say, hey, look, we're going to take control of our communities
and make them into better communities. Now, a lot of people don't get this strategy.
They say, well, why do you have to fix up the neighborhoods and communities? Because
if you are trying to end generational poverty, you have got to have the young people believing
that their community is someplace that has value. Otherwise, when you get those young
people through college, then they are going to go to somebody else's community because
no one wants to raise a family in a community that's falling apart.
So this idea of how do you rebuild community is something that we think is absolutely critical.
The second thing we are doing is we start with kids from birth, because the data is
clear and unambiguous, our kids start off behind. And it increasingly gets worse as
the kids get older. The latest study by a group called Hart and
Risley, they actually sent people into the homes of poor families on welfare to count
the words that families spoke to kids. Because we begin to learn this whole language and
verbal sort of relationship is important in how the sort of the neuronal structures get
set very early on in a child's brain. So in there and they are counting every time
a parent speaks, and then they do the same thing for professional families, families
with who have gone to college. Well, poor families on welfare, they found
out that children had heard about 13 million words by the time they entered into school.
And for professional families, 48 million. 13 million, 48 million.
35 million word difference. You can't say we're going to have equity and
fairness and one group of kids get a 35 million word head start and expect the other group
to be able to compete. Just not going to happen. So we know this early involvement is important.
And we believe you get those kids and you begin with those kids early.
But here is one of the mistakes we've made in our business. We have tried to figure out
how little you can do for a child for the shortest period of time to make a difference.
So everybody's thinking, well, can you work with kids early and then they will be fine?
Or I will do middle school and then kids will be fine.
You know what we found out? The moment those young people don't have high-quality support,
they end up not doing well. And if you really follow the data, you will find that if the
goal is to get all kids to graduate from college, that most of our kids, no matter what the
intervention, they end up dropping out of college in just extraordinarily high numbers.
So we thought you have got to stay with kids through elementary school, through middle
school, through high school, you have to get those kids into college and then you have
to help them get through college. And so the only thing we count as success is how many
of our kids graduate from college. Nothing else.
That has proven to be somewhat controversial. People are saying, Geoff, you know, you are
focused on college. All kids aren't going to college. Some kids, you need vocational
training for these kids. And I say, you know, if you get paid to work with other people's
kids, then you should have the same expectation for those kids you are paid to work with as
for your own kids. Now, the other thing -- this is also controversial.
I tell folk, when in doubt -- when you are not sure about the science because it's in
the clear, do what rich people do; right? So there's a theory for you. Just hang on
to that. And this is what I mean. I told you I have to raise a lot of money;
right? So that means I have to know a lot of wealthy people. It's hard to raise money
if all you know is poor people. I found that out the hard way.
[ Laughter ] >>Geoffrey Canada: You could try it, but you
are not going to be very effectively. And I have yet to meet someone who has wealth
and have three kids and they say, oh, so this boy, I am thinking I am going to send my son
to Yale and this one is going to Oxford, but this one here, I think I am sending her to
hairdresser school. I don't know what to do." Never heard that; right? One expectation,
all of their kids go to college. And I think that for our kids, you have to have the same
expectation. By the way, my wife and I, we have three grown
kids. We had the same expectations for all of our kids. Two of them went to college,
one didn't. Same expectations. Two went, one didn't. By the way, I think that's one of
those universal laws. If you have three kids, one of them is going to give you a run for
the money. Don't worry about it. Don't pull your hair, "Oh, what did we do wrong?" No.
That's just the way it is. But we believe that the only way you are going
to compete for jobs is if you have a college education.
I don't think there's any other way you're going to do this.
Now, here is the next thing that we fundamentally believe. You have to deal with scale. In our
area, we are working in 97 blocks in central Harlem, essentially 11,000 kids in that area.
We are working with about 8,000 of those kids. You have to work with so many kids that you
actually change what the culture is in that community.
If kids grow up in a community where they believe that it is expected of them to go
out and hustle, that they are going to go sell drugs, they are going to go and be involved
in crime, if that's what they see all around them, then most kids end up being like the
culture that they grow up in. We believe you have got to change that culture.
So when my kids are growing up in the zone, I have got about 600 of my kids who are currently
in college, and so my kids are surrounded by lots of kids who are going to college and
we're trying to make sure these kids understand that's the culture, that's what it means to
grow up in our community. In the United States, we lose our kids by
the tens of thousands, and we tend to save them by the twenties and maybe by the hundreds.
We have got to ramp this thing up and save kids by the thousands, which is what we're
doing in Harlem. Now, the fourth part of our mission really
has to deal with the use of data. And this is really incredible.
We have divorced results from practice in our business. And it's just no other business
I know of that you can simply keep doing something that's not working for decades.
And here is the challenge we have in our country. I grew up in an area of New York City called
the south Bronx. It was one of the most disadvantaged areas in New York City.
So I'm 59, so the schools I went to in the south Bronx 53 years ago, they were lousy
schools then. They're lousy schools today. So for 53 years, those schools have been lousy.
Lousy in the '60s, they were lousy in the '70s, lousy in the '80s, lousy in the '90s,
lousy in 2000. If you were to say, okay, what's different;
right? So you have had all these decades of failure. What's different in those schools
today than when I went to school, nothing. They start at the same time, they end at the
same time. Nothing. There is no sense of crisis around this issue of education.
We are totally comfortable with certain folks failing for decades and thinking we don't
have anything to do. So I make these really radical statements
that people are upset with me all over the country. Actually, itch some people upset
with me around the world because I believe -- I know this is going to sound really radical
-- that if someone cannot teach and you can prove they can't teach, then maybe they should
get another job. I know that's radical. People are upset. They
say, "Did he just say you should fire somebody who can't --" yeah. I think you should fire
them. And all around the country people are yelling,
there's Geoff, he is talking about firing folks. No, I didn't say fire mediocre people;
right? I say if you are really terrible and you can not teach, we cannot fire you in New
York City. You can't lose your job. Now, who thought of that brilliant plan; right?
Could you imagine? And it's worse, it's worse. You can't do anything different no matter
what is going on inside your classroom. They all have to start at the same time, they have
to end at the same time, they have to work the same number of days.
I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and graduated with my master's degree in 1975.
So this is ancient history. We knew then in the summertime poor kids, right, actually
lost ground with their peers. So if you looked at where they were in June and then you looked
where they were in September, they actually went down. So they had this loss over the
summer. The evidence was clear and it was scientific.
This was not anybody's opinion. Based on that evidence, there was not one
school system I know in the United States that decided, well, since our kids lose ground
in the summer, why don't we keep our schools open in the summer? Not one.
How could you have clear science, huge numbers of kids failing, and nobody do anything about
it? It is just unbelievable to me. It's simply
because we have not cared about these young people.
And people have felt like we can sacrifice these kids and it's really not going to have
an impact on our country. Those days are over.
I tell folks, this is the equivalent, the way we run schools, so the same number of
days, 3:00 all teaching stops no matter what. We don't care whether that kid has learned
or not. The whistle blows and that's it. It is a crazy system that is totally divorced
from results. It's like if you are a firefighter and you
come to a town, the whole town is burning; right? So you get all the firefighters and
they get their hoses out and they start putting on the hose and you get the fire half put
out and they say, oh, goodness, it's 3:00. Let's come back tomorrow; right? And then
you come back tomorrow, so of course the thing is still burning, it's worse, and you fight
the fire for a while and they say oh, gee, it's June, we will come back in September.
And so what if the town has burned down? Everybody would think that was crazy. They would think
those people just left? They just left in the middle of the job?
So that's what we are doing to our kids. We just leave them. So what if they are all failing?
No big deal. It's a multi-billion dollar business where
we have separated the accountability. So when we started our schools -- I told you
these schools have been failing for 50-plus years. When we started our schools, we decided
we're going to have a different accountability system. Okay, I went to our mayor, Mayor Bloomberg,
I went to the chancellor who was a guy named Joe Klein and I went to our Board of Trustees,
and I said if I don't have a better school than these other public schools in Harlem
in five years, I am going to fire myself; right?
When I said that, people wrote it down. They said, "Geoff said five years, if he doesn't
have a better school." When they left, I got my whole staff together,
I said, "But y'all know, I am the last one leaving."
[ Laughter ] >>Geoffrey Canada: Just so we're clear about
this; right? But you know I'm not kidding. You know I'm
not kidding. If there's nothing to lose in failure, can
you imagine -- can you imagine if you could run your business and it didn't matter whether
or not it was successful at all? Not at all. It just made no difference. That there would
be some -- I know, there are some people that are so committed, they would work hard and
they would do everything. But you can't run a business with the thought that people are
simply going to do the right thing regardless of results.
We have certainly run education that way for poor kids in our country, and it is no longer,
in my opinion, a minor thing. So this issue of accountability to me is absolutely
critical. We have, I think, just begun to come to grips with the fact that there are
real strategies out there that work. But the problem is there's so much resistance,
there's so much resistance to change in my business that, you know, if you look at education
-- I have been lucky enough, at my age, I remember the first computers that came into
public schools. In 1968, they brought the first computer to my school. You had to bring
the thing in a Mack truck. Do you remember what these things looked like? They were like
huge things; right? And then you had to punch holes in all of
these cards; right? Some of y'all don't know what I am talking about because y'all are
young. We used a language called Fortran back then. That's like ancient history. You made
one mistake -- You punch 200 cards, make one mistake and it wouldn't work. And you sit
there and you would punch all of this stuff and you would take all those cards and you
put it in a hopper, it would read through. After 30 minutes it could tell you eight times
eight, it would give you 64. And being a very smart person, I really was
pretty much in the genius category, after doing all that work and punching into it,
putting all that in, I just thought there's no future in this whole computer thing; right?
[ Laughter ] >>Geoffrey Canada: It didn't seem to make
a lot of sense to me; right? But you can imagine, you can imagine what
would have happened if there had been no competition -- no pressure to improve.
If everybody wanted that and they were happy to pay whatever you charged and there was
no pressure to improve anything, where would we be? Education right now, the way we teach
kids, is exactly where it was in 1968. There has not been an innovation, there's
been no change, no pressure to change. And because it's devoid of results, who cares?
I don't think that makes any sense anymore. I don't think our country can afford it, and
I think we have got to do something different. And that's what I have been yelling about.
But people keep thinking that I am yelling about a small group of kids that are pretty
much incidental in terms of the outcome for this country and that's because they haven't
really focused on what's going on in America. That our country is changing and it's changing
radically and dramatically. So I would like to leave you with one challenge
that I think we're facing, which is how come we have to think outside the box in education.
I was taught to think outside the box by one professor who, when I was an undergraduate,
I went to a small liberal arts college called Bowdoin College up in Maine, and I was a psych
major. So as a freshman I went to a psychology class, and a bunch of the upper class folks
asked me, they said, "Geoff, what's your major?" I said, "Psychology." They said, "How is your
math?" I said, "I am not really into math. I am in the social sciences." They said, "Well,
you have to pass statistics." And there were a bunch of people in a different major because
of statistics. All right? So we had our first exam coming up and I studied
all week and I was up all night and I took the exam. A week later I got the exam back.
I got a 37. I was devastated. I hadn't failed anything since the second grade. And I was
going to quit. I was just humiliated. I was embarrassed. And then somebody said go talk
to the professor. So I went in there to see the professor, I
was literally in tears and I said, look, I want to help people. I want to be a psych
major. I worked so hard on this. I was up all night. I don't know what happened? He
said Geoff, calm down. He said I know what happened. I said what happened? He said it
was the slant. I said what do you mean the slant? He said you will get this because you
are a psych major. All of our textbooks, they have real authors, and the authors have real
biases, and the biases come up in their writing. This textbook has an author with a particularly
strong bias. It's working for all the other kids, it's not working for you. He says, "I
want to you try a textbook written by an author written with the opposite bias." He said we'll
try a little experiment. Read tonight's chapter, answer the questions, see what happens.
I read the chapter, I answered the questions, I didn't get it. He said, "I want you to read
that same chapter in the new book, answer the questions, see what happens. I read the
chapter, answered the questions, I got it. I said I understood it.
He said, "Well, look. We have finals coming up, you have three chapters left. I want you
to read the three chapters in the old book, answer the questions, see what happens."
I read the chapters, answered the questions, I didn't get it.
He said, "I want you to read those same three chapters in the new book, answer the questions,
see if you get it." I read the chapters, answered the questions,
I got it. I took the exam, I got an "A" on the exam.
Well, the next semester I was sitting in a perception class when it suddenly hit me.
I said you know what? That didn't have anything to do with a slant. This guy got me to read
two books; right? And I was absolutely furious with him; right? He took advantage of my sophomoric
mind with that whole slant thing. But it reminds me, it reminds me that we constantly
have to push innovation. I mean, we just have to push it. We can no longer allow the status
quo to continue. And that has been the mission that I have been on at the Harlem Children's
Zone. That's what I am going to continue to yell about. I think this is important for
our country. If we're going to have a great country 30 years from now, we have to solve
this right now. So thank you all very much.
[ Applause ]
