For years, educators have tried and failed to get poor kids from the inner city to do just as well i...

1. Harlem's Education Experiment Gone Right
For years, educators have tried and failed to get poor kids from the inner city to do just as well in
school as kids from America's more affluent suburbs. Black kids still routinely score well below white
kids on national standardized tests.
But a man named Geoffrey Canada may have figured out a way to close that racial achievement gap.
What he's doing has been called one of the most ambitious social experiments to alleviate poverty of
our lifetime. His laboratory is a 97-block neighborhood in Harlem, which he has flooded with a wide
array of social, medical and educational services available for free to the 10,000 children who live
there. It is called the "Harlem Children's Zone."
Harlem Children's Zone
The Education Innovation Laboratory
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Ed Bradley first reported on 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 are nothing short of stunning, so much so that the White
House is now taking notice.
For Geoffrey Canada however, it is just a start.
"You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That
everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem,
and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie,'" Canada told CNN's Anderson Cooper.
"So you're trying to level the playing field between kids here in Harlem and middle class kids in a
suburb?" Cooper asked.
"That's exactly what we think we have to do," Canada said. "You know, if you grow up in a
community where your schools are inferior, where the sounds of gunshots are a common thing,
where you spend your time and energy not thinking about algebra or geometry, but about how not to
get beat up, or not to get shot, or not to get raped, when you grow up like that, you don't have the
same opportunity as other children growing up. And we're trying to change those odds."
He's trying to change those odds on a scale never before attempted. His goal: to break the cycle of
poverty in an entire neighborhood by making sure all the kids who live there go to college.
"You really believe that's possible, to break that cycle?" Cooper asked.
"I absolutely know we're gonna do it," Canada replied.

2. Canada remembers well what it was like to be a kid in the inner city. He grew up not far from
Harlem in another tough New York neighborhood, the South Bronx.
Abandoned by his father, he and his three brothers were raised by their mother, who was barely able
to get by.
"When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my
mother about it. And she was like, 'No, no, no. There's no Superman.' And I started crying. I really
thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming," he
remembered.
A teenager, his grandparents moved to the suburbs and he went with them. He got into Bowdoin
College and then the Harvard School of Education.
He's been working with kids in Harlem virtually ever since.
"You know, one of the first things kids ask me when they really get to know me, they say, 'Mr.
Canada,' I say 'Yes sir.' 'Are you rich?' And I say, 'Yeah, I am.' And they're so excited, because they
think I finally know somebody who has power. What they really want to ask is, 'Is there any way that
you can help me figure out how to get a nice car and maybe get a house?' And I think they want
someone to say 'Yes, you can.' I got out, you can get out. There's a way. And I'm gonna help you do
that."
To do it, Canada decided to build his own school in the Children's Zone. Right now there are some
1,200 kids enrolled from Kindergarten through the tenth grade. It'll eventually expand all the way
through the 12th grade.
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