The Harlem Children's Zone as counterinsurgency

Last year I wrote a short review of Paul Tough’s book Whatever it Takes, his account of the evolution of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone into one of the most ambitious community development programmes in America. The HCZ is also the subject of a new documentary, "Waiting for Superman", which is getting lots of controversial buzz. The controversy mostly surrounds the film’s argument that one of the biggest obstacles to kids’ succeeding in school is incompetent teachers, who are protected by unions.

At the core of Mr. Canada’s project is the conviction that in order to succeed, a student needs all of the support that a middle-class student gets simply by being middle class -- regular meals, parental attention, moral support, secure and stable homelife, etc. And so what makes the HCZ different from similar charter schools (like the KIPP network) is that it tries to provide not just in-class attention and support to students, but a comprehensive  “conveyor belt” of support programmes, including parenting classes,  medical care, after-school programmes and so on, all designed to provide the appropriate and necessary intervention at the point in the child’s life when it is most needed and most likely to succeed.

But the Harlen Children’s Zone experiment is itself running into trouble. In particular, its two “Promise Academy” charter schools are not getting glowing results, especially on standardized English tests. A second complaint is with the cost of the programs: the HCZ spends about $16k per student per year, with thousands more spent on out of classroom programs. Finally, even as there is pressure for the federal government to get involved and bring the funds to scale the HCZ model up across the country, there is not a lot of sound evidence that whatever success the schools have had, it is the out-of-classroom supports that are driving it.

In a way, it would be nice if the conveyor belt were found to be unnecessary. There is a pretty strong analogy between what the HCZ is trying to do, and the counterinsurgency strategy that is the heart of the surge in Afghanistan. Just as the military COIN strategy aims to protect the population by providing all of the "supports" a citizen normally gets from civil society (governance, infrastructure, legal system, development, aid, policing, etc), the HCZ tries to protect the student by giving him or her all of the support that a middle-class student gets simply by being middle class -- regular meals, parental attention, moral support, secure and stable homelife, and so on.

In both cases, you can probably get some semblance of success as long as you are willing to spend a great deal of money and devote a huge amount of resources; sort of like a sociocultural life-support system. But the question is whether any of it is sustainable once that support is taken away. In both cases, the answer appears to be that it doesn't, for similar reasons. You can't build a culture, or a nation, out of whole cloth. It has to be evolved organically in order to be self-sustaining. That's why, at least in the case of the HCZ, for interventions to work, the sooner they are implemented the better. If you want to help a child out of the poverty trap, you have to intervene preferably in infancy; by the time the kids get to kindergarten it is too late.

But ultimately, the moral is probably the same for both education and nation-building: A stable, cooperative society is itself a form of capital, probably the most valuable form that exists. The “middle class” society that most of us take for granted is actually an anomaly, and it isn’t clear that we have any idea how to construct one. What we do know is that it takes a great deal of time and patience, and all the money in the world isn’t going to do much to speed it up.