'Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America' by Paul Tough

Geoffrey Canada's Quest

to Change Harlem and America

Paul Tough

Houghton Mifflin: 296 pp., $26

AS THE gung-ho title suggests, this book is an exhausting read. I mean that in the best possible way. Paul Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, gives a dense but clear account of the mighty struggle of a project known as the Harlem Children's Zone to recast America's most famous black ghetto as a locus of black success. The brainchild of Geoffrey Canada, a lean, driven man in his 50s who grew up in the South Bronx and despises the word "no," the wide-ranging project seeks to go where no program has gone before. It aspires not to be a program at all, but an entire safety net tightly woven of everything that makes communities work -- good social services, prenatal counseling, parental involvement and, most crucially, good public schools. This is the story of how Canada has sought since creating the zone in the late 1990s to assemble an entire "conveyor belt" that will deliver to every child in the 97-block area the support and services he or she needs from birth until graduation from high school. Whereupon they will go to college, of course. That's the idea.

What's so striking about the story is not just Canada's determination in the face of overwhelming odds; we've read that plenty of times. Tough's book is about the magnitude of the task undertaken by one man and his staff of acolytes, but Tough is more interested in what that monumental task reveals about the rest of us. He lauds Canada's efforts to give poor black children the opportunity he deeply believes they deserve, but he also questions why society as a whole seems not to share Canada's view. One thing Tough puts in stark relief is the fact that the goal of equality in education has been replaced with exhortations for excellence, a nice way of saying that every community is on its own, including communities of poor black kids who need the most help and suffer the worst effects of isolation. Canada knows this. A former college radical, he doesn't approve of the paradigm shift away from equality and justice, but he doesn't have time to waste thinking about it, and neither do the kids. Time isn't on their side.