Q&A with Harlem Children's Campaign Founder Geoffrey Canada

Photo by Gabriel Christus / The Aurora Sentinel

It isn’t tough for Geoffrey Canada to see the parallels between the Cherry Creek School District and the educational system in New York. Canada, the founder the Harlem Children’s Campaign and one of the featured subjects of David Guggenheim’s 2010 documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,” visited Overland High School during Cherry Creek's "Success for Every Student" conference on April 16, addressing larger shortfalls in the American public education system. He also praised the “zone” teaching model that’s taking hold at the campus shared between Overland and Prairie Middle School. The Aurora Sentinel caught up with Canada to get his take on the new STEM facility at Overland, the problems with teachers’ unions and commonalities between Aurora and Harlem.

Aurora Sentinel (Adam Goldstein): How does the STEM institute here at Overland align with the reform efforts you’ve been making on a national scale?

Geoffrey Canada: It’s clear to me that this issue of science, technology, engineering and math is really going to be the next major area that educators are going to have to be serious about.

The idea is that if you go into some of our most elite colleges and universities and you look to see who’s in the Ph.D program in math and science, you find hardly any Americans who can compete. As a matter of fact, people won’t be honest about it, but if we didn’t have quotas about allowing in foreign students, we’d hardly get any of those seats at all. They just aren’t preparing this next generation to be competitive.

I think looking at this area and deciding that this is something that there’s going to be a real investment in is a very smart move.

One of the great things about what’s happening at colleges and universities is they’re realizing that if they don’t have really up-to-date science and technology facilities, then they can’t compete. Students will not go there. You’ll find this is becoming more and more of a class issue.

If you go to the wealthy high schools, you find those opportunities a lot more readily available than if you’re going to schools that are in working class or poor communities. I think this is a big signal. They have really embraced this philosophy where there’s really a focus on all the kids and high quality, standards and knowing that the kids are really getting an education.

AS: I want to go back to the teachers’ union issue raised in “Waiting for Superman” and discussed today. What do you think has to be done to balance the dual demands of keeping quality teachers and fairness? How do you maintain a structure to protect teachers while also holding them accountable as far as results in the classroom?

GC: Honest to goodness, I’ve never met an aspiring teacher in a college or university who told me they wanted to join the union. People don’t go into education thinking, ‘Boy, I want to join the union.’

This is an after-the-fact issue, meaning that it is not on a 20-year-old’s mind, ‘Maybe when I become a teacher, everybody’s going to take advantage of me so I need a union to protect me.’

(There’s) this sense that this one particular profession is so vulnerable to corruption and exploitation that it needs something in and of itself that is different from what doctors and business folks and lawyers and other professionals need.

Look, I understand when women couldn’t work in any other industry, and this idea that you would get women primarily raising families … That doesn’t make sense anymore. In every other industry, women are sort of becoming the dominant players. You know what? They don’t have a schedule for women in law and medicine. It’s complicated, but that’s the way it is.

Here, you’ve got a structure that was invented which everybody assumes has this purpose: stopping them from getting you, which is why we need a union. I just haven’t seen much evidence of that in the last 25 years, that there’s this huge need.

Having said that, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a teachers’ union. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with professors belonging to a union, or if there’s tenure in the colleges and universities.

I actually like that unions try to level the playing field and some of the other issues. The challenge is that they have become so inflexible. The inability to get salary concessions has led to their ability to become experts in getting everything but salary.

That’s more time off, more things you don’t have to do, more barriers before you can get fired – all of that stuff, when they really need to work and make sure that when these teachers, when they come to teach, they can pay their college bills.

It should be yelling and saying, ‘We need exemptions for teachers so when they come out of school owing $60,000, teaching could be a career you could think about vs. you couldn’t afford to do it.’

To me, the union’s focus has been on these other areas, which are kind of anti-reform, and not focused on areas that we really need.

Let’s make this a competitive profession, so when kids are thinking, ‘Do I want to get an M.B.A. or do I want to go to medical school or do I want to go to law school,’ teaching is up there with the same sort of prestige.

That’s what we’re missing right now. If the unions were doing that kind of stuff, they’d find that I was an ally. It’s this other stuff that they know doesn’t work.

AS: In the film, you talked about your post-college expectations to change the inequities in the U.S. educational system within a few years, only to realize just how daunting such reforms would actually be. Is private investment a key part of getting away from the bureaucracy of the country’s educational system?

GC: I absolutely think that private dollars have to be part of the equation, because we can not trust that public dollars will not be totally swayed by politicians who are unable to make the tough choices.

I believe you’ve got to make tough choices. If schools don’t go right, you’ve got to close them down. You can’t keep doing things that don’t work. The ability, I think, for our political leadership to make the tough decisions, to me, is compromised when there’s no private dollars involved.

The people I know will not allow us to run a lousy school. I don’t care if the public schools have been lousy. They will not give us money if our schools are lousy.

I think that’s the right balance and that’s the right mix. When the White House wanted to replicate our work and they wanted to do Promise Neighborhoods, the one thing I said was I would really be opposed to it if they didn’t do a 50/50 match, if it was mostly public dollars.

People keep saying things work when they don’t work. We need the ability to say that we did that and we worked really hard, but it did not work and now we need to change it. The inability, I think, in our business to do that is what’s limited the science from taking root and moving forward.

People end up with these positions where they support stuff, even though they know it doesn’t work.

AS: There are a lot of differences between the Cherry Creek School District and the districts where you’ve enacted reform in New York. What’s universal about the ‘zone’ approach that works regardless of environment?

GC: Let me tell you why I’m so convinced that this is the right approach: It’s the approach that all the parents use. I just never have seen someone raise a kid and think they don’t need a high quality experience at this point in their life. We spend all of our time trying to figure out how we get our kids from one great experience to the next great experience. I don’t know any parent with money who will send their kid to a lousy school.

They’ll move. They’ll do whatever they have to do. We all know as parents this is important and you would never send your kid to a great elementary school and then be comfortable with them going to a lousy middle school.

Everybody realizes that if that kid leaves fifth or sixth grade and goes to that place where all the other kids are failing, there’s a good chance that kid is going to fail.
This idea of creating a pipeline where a kid goes from one high quality experience to another to another, I don’t have to worry about if it’s going to work in Denver because the kids are slightly different than the kids in Harlem.

We figure this all out as parents. When people think about kids who are disadvantaged, they stop seeing them as our own kids. I feel if you really see these kids as our kids, you’ll do for them what you would do for your own kids.