364: Going Big

Ira Glass

In every low-income neighborhood in every city in the United States, there are people trying to make things better. Ministers, teachers, social workers. If you have one of those jobs, sometimes the best way to get through each day is to think small. Get this one parent off drugs. Get this one kid through the school year. Deal with stuff you can actually fix. But Geoffrey Canada grew up poor in the South Bronx raised by a single mom on welfare. Somehow he managed to make it out of the neighborhood to a good college in Maine, then off to Harvard.

But he wanted to help kids like the ones he'd grown up with. So he came back to New York City, took over a community organization in Harlem. This group did a really good job. They helped a lot of kids stay in school, keep out of trouble. But after a decade in this job, Geoffrey Canada started to get frustrated. Things were getting worse in Harlem. Fewer kids were graduating high school. Incarceration rates were rising, poverty was on the rise. And that's when he decided to make a change and go big.

Today on our radio show, we have three stories of people deciding that they are going to pull out all the stops. They're going to go to extreme, audacious lengths. They're going to do things that not only have they never heard of, I think nobody's ever heard of, for their communities, for their families, for the people they care for. It is This American Life, by the way, from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. In Act two of today's show, we have somebody going to really absurd lengths-- I think I can say that-- to win over a woman. In Act three, we have a daughter reaching out to her mom using means I believe anyone would find extraordinary. And let's get right to it.

Ira Glass

Act one, an act that we're calling Harlem Renaissance, we have the story of Geoffrey Canada and what happened when he decided to go big. Paul Tough tells that story.

Paul Tough

The thing that changed Geoffrey Canada's thinking about the best way to help poor children was having a child of his own. This was 10 years ago, when he was in his mid-40s. It wasn't his first time being a father. That was a whole generation earlier, when he was still in college, a poor kid from a rough neighborhood on scholarship. That first marriage didn't last long, but in his early 40s, he remarried. And a couple of years later, he and his new wife had a son they named Geoffrey Jr.

Things were a lot different in his second go-around as a dad. He was no longer a struggling young father trying to make ends meet. He was now a well-educated, upper middle class guy living in a big home in the suburbs, surrounded by trees and lawns and golf courses. His life had changed in the 25 years since his first child was born. And he found out that parenting had changed too, for his neighbors at least. There was a ton of new research on the importance of stimulating your child's brain early on. And apparently every parent in the suburbs had heard about these studies because they were obsessed with preparing their infants. Baby Einstein tapes, flash cards, brain-building toys. Everyone was doing it.

Paul Tough

And Geoff started to think, well, if he was overwhelmed by all this new information, what about the parents he was working with in Harlem? He turned to his staff at the organization he ran and asked them to canvas the neighborhood and find out what this new parenting revolution looked like from the streets of Harlem.

Paul Tough

During this same period, Geoff's thinking was evolving in another way as well. After so many years of frustration, of saving one kid and watching 10 more slip through his fingers, he begin to wonder. What if instead of reaching 5% or 10% of the kids in Harlem, he could reach 40 or 50 or 60% of them? Maybe there was a tipping point where the whole culture of the neighborhood would start to change, where teenage pregnancy and going to prison and dropping out would be considered strange behaviors, instead of something you just expect, the normal course of events. So with all these ideas in his head, he went before his board of directors and said we have to rethink everything.

Paul Tough

I'm in a cafeteria in a Central Harlem elementary school, surveying what, 10 years later, Geoffrey Canada's vision has become-- an organization called the Harlem Children's Zone. A program unlike anything else in the country. It represents a complete rethinking of the way we've been dealing with urban poverty. The scope of Geoff's ambition is huge, to reach almost every child living in 97 inner-city blocks in Central Harlem, 10,000 kids in all, and make sure they all graduate from high school and get through college. To give you a sense of what that means, 10 years ago, only a little more than half the kids in Harlem even finished high school.

To make this happen, he's grown his organization to 10 times its original size, built a comprehensive system of integrated services, going from cradle to college. There are two charter schools, a health clinic, a family counseling center, even a farmer's market and free tax preparation. But first, he's concluded, he needs to get Harlem's parents on board. He wants them to rethink how to raise their kids, to show them what middle class parents are doing. And that starts right here in Baby College.

Paul Tough

Scientists have concluded that the most effective time to intervene in the lives of poor kids is between the ages of zero and three, when the only people who can really give that help are the parents. And so for the last two months, a full-time team of 15 outreach workers has been roaming the streets of Harlem, going door to door in housing projects and stopping random pregnant women at the supermarket or on the subway, grabbing anyone pushing a stroller, trying to persuade them to give up nine Saturday mornings in a row to take classes on how to be a better parent.

Paul Tough

The idea of trying to mess around in the private life of a disadvantaged family is one that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It's essentially telling poor parents that there's a better way to raise your kids, and we're going to tell you how. But somehow, that's not what it feels like at Baby College. It feels like a conversation, like we're on your side. Like it'll be fun.

Paul Tough

For the last five years, I've been writing a book about Geoffrey Canada's effort to go big. I spent this summer with the parents in Baby College. For most of these kids, if everything goes according to Geoffrey Canada's plan, this will be the beginning of a lifetime of involvement with the Harlem Children's Zone. And it's Baby College that sets the whole thing in motion, and in the process, challenges many assumptions about what is and isn't possible for a social program to tackle.

Paul Tough

After five years of reporting, I've come to believe, as Geoffrey Canada does, that there is a solution to poverty in America. And on this morning anyway, that solution sounds something like this.

Paul Tough

In a classroom down the hall from the cafeteria, a dozen expecting parents are sitting in a half circle, perched on those hard little elementary school chairs. They're listening to their instructor, Hassan. Today's class is all about brain development. And Hassan is talking about all the ways that parents can help their children's brains to grow-- singing songs, playing games, talking, and most importantly, reading to them.

Paul Tough

A lot of what gets taught in Baby College-- that you should read to your kid every night, use timeouts instead of corporal punishment-- is the stuff that Geoffrey Canada discovered in the suburbs. Knowledge that over the last couple of decades has made its way into pretty much every middle and upper middle class home in America, but barely penetrated low-income neighborhoods like Harlem.

Paul Tough

There's lots of science to back up what Hassan is saying. One research project that underlies everything that happens in Baby College was done in the 1980s in Kansas City. A pair of psychologists did a closeup study of two sets of families. One group, in which the parents were on welfare, and another, in which the parents held professional jobs.

It turned out that the biggest difference between the two sets of homes was language. The kids with the professional parents heard 20 million more words in the first three years of their lives than the kids on welfare, mostly just the regular jabber-jabber of parents talking to their children. And those extra words had a huge effect on their verbal ability. It was stunning news that the biggest factor in determining a child's later success in school wasn't any of the things we always assumed to be true. It wasn't money. It wasn't parental education. It wasn't race. It was the sheer number of words your parents spoke to you as a child. Among scholars who study inequality, there is more and more evidence out there that the divide between the kids who make it and the kids who don't starts in the very first years of life. The researcher who has done the best job of pulling all this together is a man named James Heckman.

Paul Tough

Heckman is an economist at the University of Chicago. In the early '90s, he was hired to study some government programs aimed at adolescents from poor neighborhoods-- all the traditional solutions to poverty we've been using for the last 40 years. Things like job training, GED programs, programs for dropouts. And much to his surprise, he found that none of these programs were actually working. Job training was supposed to be the solution to welfare. But Heckman found that for the young adults he was studying, it wasn't doing any good at all.

The premise behind job training is that young people who can't find a good job are just missing one particular skill or body of knowledge. Teach them that and they'll be fine. What Heckman found is that the people in these programs had a much bigger problem. There were some very basic skills and abilities that they had never learned. And it was hard for them to absorb anything new without those skills. Things like--

Paul Tough

As Heckman continued his research, he discovered some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that if kids don't get these very basic skills pretty early in life, ideally before reaching kindergarten, then those skills become harder and harder to acquire. If you haven't achieved basic reading fluency by eight or nine or 10, it's very hard to learn after that.

And if by adolescence you haven't learned those non-cognitive skills like patience and self control, the odds are stacked against you ever learning those. But the good news was that the reverse was also true. If you can get to a poor child early on, in the first few years of life, even small interventions can have huge effects.

Paul Tough

In the course of writing my book, I went through Baby College a few times. And every time, the discipline classes were the most intense. And they were the hardest sell with the parents. That language study that discovered that well-off kids hear 20 million more words than poor kids before age three also found that the kind of language poor kids hear is different. The researchers counted the number of encouraging and discouraging remarks that children heard from their parents. And the difference between the two groups was staggering.

By age three, a child of professionals hears about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. A child of parents on welfare hears almost the exact opposite, just 80,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. According to the scientists who study this stuff, physical and verbal punishment has a huge effect on a child's emotional development, and on cognitive development too. For most parents in Baby College, though, these were pretty foreign ideas.

Paul Tough

Dominique's class is for parents of children under a year old. The kids are all sitting on the carpet in the middle of a circle of chairs, playing with blocks and rattles. And the kids don't know it, but Dominique is hard at work trying to keep them from getting hit, smacked, or popped by their parents, who are all sitting in a circle around the outside of the classroom. Dominique wants the parents to talk about alternatives to corporal punishment, like negotiating, timeouts, talking to a child. The parents don't seem all that convinced. One mother speaks up and says Dominique has forgotten to mention her favorite kind of discipline.

Paul Tough

She pantomimes giving a child a smack. There's a feeling in the room that if the only tool you have to deal with your kid's acting up is to talk to them and just tell them to be good, they'll misbehave like crazy. As one mother puts it, for some children, sometimes you've just got to pop them.

Paul Tough

Again, Geoff Canada.

Paul Tough

It's counterintuitive for many parents, this idea that a good kid isn't necessarily a quiet, well-behaved kid. So it isn't easy to convince them that this different style of parenting might actually work. But it's one of the amazing things about Baby College. You can actually see parents change their minds as the nine weeks go on. One young mother in the class speaks up and says that she's actually having second thoughts about popping her kids, the way she's done until now.

Paul Tough

This idea that the habits of a parent are passed on to the child is not lost on anyone in the classroom. A lot of the parents are worried about imitating their own parents' behavior. Like this mother, Taisha, who said her mother's favorite form of communication is yelling.

Paul Tough

Academics and scholars who study poor communities often talk about the cycle of poverty. And when I sat down outside of class with Taisha, I realized that she saw herself the way the academics did, as a statistic.

Paul Tough

Taisha is 20. And she and her boyfriend [? Rossi ?] have a 10-month-old son named [? Rahsaan ?]. After class I talked with them for a while to try to get a sense of how much of a difference Baby College might make in their lives. They met in high school, it turned out. Taisha was one of the best students in her class. [? Rossi ?] was mostly interested in playing basketball. But when he started falling for Taisha, he knew he needed to pull up his grades to win her heart, so he hit the books. And when he graduated, he had a B average and a steady girlfriend. Taisha started college that fall. And then in December, she found out she was pregnant.

Paul Tough

But the decision didn't make her feel any better. She stayed depressed, didn't know what to do, fought with [? Rossi. ?] And then last spring, Taisha read about Baby College on a poster that an outreach worker had taped up in the lobby of the housing project where she was staying with her aunt. [? Rossi ?] agreed to come with her that first day, but he figured he'd just sit in the back and be a spectator. To his surprise, though, he ended up finding a lot of the information that first day really helpful. And he hasn't missed a class since.

Paul Tough

When Taisha was growing up, she knew she wanted to have a different kind of life. But she didn't have anyone around her to show her what that looked like. Well, there was one family.

Paul Tough

It was watching The Cosby Show when she was a kid that gave Taisha an alternate vision for what her life might be like.

Paul Tough

For most middle class kids, the path that Taisha struggled to find is so straight and well-paved that they barely even notice it's there. Geoffrey Canada knows that he probably won't be able to create a Cosby Show environment for Taisha's son [? Rahsaan ?] or for any of the thousands of other kids in his programs. But he thinks that with the help of Taisha and [? Rossi ?], he can create a pretty good substitute. It's kind of a revolutionary idea. For years, we've been trying to improve the lives of poor children by improving the lives of their parents. Getting the parents better jobs or more money or better housing.

But Geoff is saying that we may be able to counter many of the effects of poverty on children without actually lifting their parents out of poverty. Just focus on the kids, get them through college, and then they can lift themselves out of poverty. The thing he invented to do this he calls the conveyor belt. In a couple of years, [? Rahsaan ?] will be eligible for the early lottery to get into one of the charter schools that the Harlem Children's Zone runs. If he gets in, his parents will have an opportunity to go through a more advanced parenting program called The Three-Year-Old Journey. The following year, [? Rahsaan ?] will have a guaranteed spot in Harlem Gems, the all-day prekindergarten.

Then he'll start school. And he can stay in the same school all the way to college, with plenty of after-school programs and social supports along the way. When he graduates from high school, [? Rahsaan ?] should have in front of him the kind of opportunities that very few kids used to have in Harlem, even if his parents never managed to turn into the Huxtables. But when I sat down with Geoff to discuss [? Rossi ?] and Taisha and their young son [? Rahsaan, ?] I realized that although Geoff is committed to his choice, save the kids rather than the parents, it still involves some painful trade-offs for him.

Paul Tough

It's hard, when you're just 19 or 20, to accept the idea that you're not the one who's going to make it out of poverty, that instead, your job is to make sure your kid makes it out. Taisha, especially, really struggles with that idea. Her Cosby Show dream seemed so close just a couple of years ago. But [? Rossi ?] and Taisha both say that the most important thing is to make sure the cycle that they're caught in doesn't claim [? Rahsaan ?] too.

Paul Tough

All the experts I interviewed for this story, and for my book, told me the same thing. It's much easier than people think. And so far, Geoff's efforts bear that out. The experiment is working. Think of what that means. For decades, we've thought that raising large numbers of kids out of poverty was basically impossible, that the best we could possibly hope to do was to pluck a few over-achievers out of the ghetto and airlift them into the middle class. But it turns out the only reason we thought it was so impossible to pull off was because we were doing it wrong.

Here's the data. Last year, the first group of kids in Geoff Canada's charter school made it to third grade, where they took their first New York state achievement tests. The results were astonishing. The class was all poor and African American, most in single-parent homes, some with parents who had been teenage mothers or high school dropouts or had trouble with the law. And they had reading scores above the New York City average. Their math scores were phenomenal, more than 95% of them on grade level. And these are kids who got to kindergarten before the conveyor belt was fully constructed. Most of them didn't attend the pre-kindergarten and their parents didn't go to Baby College.

But the kids entering kindergarten now have been with the program since birth. They've been on the conveyor belt their whole lives. Which is why Geoff says that his best work is still to come. When these kids get to third grade, he says, look out. It's one of those things where it seems impossible until you see it done. It's not like we don't know how to raise a kid to succeed. We do it all the time in middle class neighborhoods. All it would take for things to change in Harlem is for us to decide that we want to do for kids there what we do for kids everywhere else.

Ira Glass

Paul Tough. He's one of the original editors of our radio show. His book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone is called Whatever It Takes. It just came out in paperback with a new afterword updating the story. And a lot has happened in that update. For starters, back when Barack Obama was running for president, he praised the Harlem Children's Zone for saving a generation of children up in Harlem.

Ira Glass

As president, he's trying to follow through, calling his program Promise Neighborhoods, and he is is targeting 20 cities with an initial investment of $10 million for planning grants and feasibility studies. If Congress approves his 2010 budget, the first planning grants could go out as early as this fall.

Coming up, when the most romantic possible thing you can do is also the least romantic possible thing you can do. That's from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Going Big. Stories of people going full out, pulling out all the stops for those they care for. We have arrived at Act Two, Lonely Hearts Club Band... of One.

Not long ago, a musician named David Berkeley got a call from his booking agent, asking if he wanted to take a job that would be unlike any concert he had ever played. Berkeley is a singer-songwriter on the indie music circuit. He gets showcased at South by Southwest. He's toured with Rufus Wainwright and Billy Bragg and Ben Folds, people like that. And though he has played tons of shows all over the country, this one was different. He would fly to San Diego and play inside an apartment for just two people. And his goal would be to reunite the two as a couple.

Now of course, most songwriters want to believe their music has the power to move people's hearts. But rarely does anybody test just how far that goes in such a clear-cut goal-oriented way. The guy in this couple wanted to be together. The woman, apparently, did not. Could David Berkeley sing them back together? Could this work? He wanted to believe it could.

Ira Glass

A few months after all this, David Berkeley was back in California, doing a show in Los Angeles. And the guy emailed him, asking if David would give him two spots on the guest list. But the guy did not bring the girl. He came with a buddy. And he told David afterwards that things didn't work out. Incredibly, David says that he would do this all over again if somebody else asked him to do it. And as for the guy--

Ira Glass

David Berkeley. His newest album is called Strange Light. Marshall Lewy helped us produce that story.

[MUSIC - "ISN'T IT ROMANTIC" BY ELLA FITZGERALD]

Ira Glass

Act Three, Prisoner of the Heart. So we've had parents in Harlem going all out to change the lives of their kids. We've had a guy going all out to get a girl. Now in this act, we have a daughter who goes all out, goes as far as anybody possibly could to get close to her mom. Douglas McGray tells the story.

Douglas McGray

21 years ago, Daisy Benson brought a gun to an argument. She says she didn't mean to shoot, and that may be true. But you bring a gun to an argument, a lot can go wrong. Daisy was convicted of murder, given 15 to life, and sent away to prison hundreds of miles from her home, a small, poor town in Northern California. Seven years later, her family saved up enough to visit. That's when her daughter Robin, she was in her 20s at the time, hatched a plan that sounded so crazy when Daisy first told me about it, I thought, this can't be true. But then I tracked down Robin, and they both remember it starting exactly the same way. Here's Daisy, then Robin.

Douglas McGray

So Robin was already living the kind of life that might lead to prison. She didn't care. But then suddenly, she did. She could go to jail and be with her mom. A year later, when she and her friends got hauled in for stealing, she told me she confessed to everything, even things she hadn't done.

Douglas McGray

When Daisy went away, California had one small prison for women called CIW. But longer sentences and a three strikes law helped set off a prison boom. The state had to build two more. Robin got sentenced to one of the new ones, up north-- not part of the plan. Now she had to finagle a transfer somehow. She roamed the yard, looking for advice.

Douglas McGray

Eventually, someone told her about a prison work program that would get her shipped south where Daisy was. One day, a letter came for Daisy, postmarked from another prison. She couldn't believe what it said. And the letter had taken so long to get there, that the same day it arrived-- well, I'll let Daisy tell it.

Douglas McGray

Mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins-- they cross paths in here more than you'd think. The stories aren't always happy. A staff person told me, yeah, we had identical twins in here one time. And one of them lit herself on fire. Mother/daughter cell mates? That he'd never seen. But when Daisy asked, the administration said yes. So Robin moved in. They shared eight feet square, if that, with bunk beds. A year after she first stared out at the prison yard, Robin got her wish. Prison was a lot harsher than Robin expected, just like her mom had said it would be.

Douglas McGray

A lot of their time together was just fun, for prison anyway.

Douglas McGray

Even before she went to prison, Daisy had been gone a lot, working at the canneries or the turkey plant, driving a bus. Now there was none of that, no distractions.

Douglas McGray

They were in together for almost a year. When the time came for Robin to be released, she was ready. Daisy wasn't.

Douglas McGray

Robin's not doing so well these days. Since her time with her mom, more than 10 years ago, she's been in and out of prison. The more time a person spends inside, the harder it is to make a life outside.

Douglas McGray

A couple months ago, Daisy wrote me a letter that said she might be home by Thanksgiving. The parole board approved her for release, but the governor has the final say. And it's easier to say no. Earlier this year, facing a budget crisis, and a prison system that costs $10 billion a year-- five times more than Texas spends-- the governor tried to let some nonviolent offenders out early. Legislators revolted. They cut from schools instead.

Daisy's 59 now. But like most of the lifers, she seems a lot older. A walker keeps her upright. A pacemaker keeps her heart going. She's lost most of her front teeth. When she laughs, she covers her mouth. Robin writes to her mother, but she's only gone back to see her once since she boarded a prison bus and drove out through the gate. Her mom told her not to look back, but she did. She does.

Ira Glass

Douglas McGray. He's an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Seth Lind is our Production Manager. Production help from P.J. Vogt and Aaron Scott. Jessica Hopper is our Music Consultant. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ Management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who tells me all the time--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.