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From Baby College to Adult Success
When does a child’s ability to bridge the black-white achievement gap begin? The people at Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) think it starts in the womb.
HCZ, a nonprofit in Harlem aimed at raising the school success rates of neighborhood children and keeping them out of prison (they routinely quote the statistic that a black boy born in 2001 has a 33 percent chance of being incarcerated), is attempting to change the sensibilities of inner-city parenting with a nine-week program called the Baby College. Parents are taught to read and sing to their children at the earliest stages of life, to hit less and “time-out” more, and to keep their kids up-to-date on immunizations.
This may sound startlingly basic to parents who rush to Borders at the first signs of pregnancy to pick up Baby Einstein programs, but the Baby College targets parents who lack the resources to invest considerable time and money in infant care, and who may have picked up parenting cues from their own abusive or neglectful parents. As so many of the city’s social ills are linked to maladapted scofflaw kids with poor test scores who shun authority and grow up to be maladapted scofflaw adults with poor job prospects, the program is somewhat of a break through in its simplicity.
“We want parental involvement throughout a child’s life and for parents to understand their role as ‘first teacher,’” says Baby College program director Marilyn Joseph. Indeed, many studies have shown that kids’ home lives are often just as important as the quality of their schools.
The Baby College started in 1997 with the launch of the Harlem Children’s Zone Project — a pilot of what was then called the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families — as the point-of-entry to what Joseph calls HCZ’s “conveyor belt”: first Baby College, then pre-K program Harlem Gems, then (for those lucky enough to get picked in a lottery) HCZ’s wildly acclaimed charter schools. The idea is that with hawk-like supervision throughout a kid’s life, there is no opportunity for failure.
The Baby College is the point-of-entry to what Joseph calls Harlem Children’s Zone’s “conveyor belt”: first Baby College, then pre-K program Harlem Gems, then HCZ’s wildly acclaimed charter schools. The idea is that with hawk-like supervision throughout a kid’s life, there is no opportunity for failure.”
HCZ’s charter schools, collectively called Promise Academy, have been incredibly successful, according to studies conducted by Harvard researcher Roland Fryer. His work showed that black Promise students “have completely closed the [black-white] achievement gap in math” and even outperformed their white peers attending New York City public schools. In language, they performed better than black students not in the charter school, but still significantly worse than whites.
But Fryer’s study also showed that Baby College alone did not increase school preparedness by the time children reached age 4 or 8. (Fryer was out of the country and not available for an interview for this article, and Debra Wexler, a spokesperson for Harvard’s EdLabs, declined requests for NAC to interview Will Dobbie, Fryer’s co-author of a study on HCZ.) This doesn’t necessarily mean that Baby College is ineffectual. HCZ is in the process of conducting its own study of how children who completed only Baby College and/or the Harlem Gems program fared later on. One evaluation conducted by an independent researcher found that among parents who read and sang to their children fewer than five times a week, 76 percent did so more after completing Baby College.
Regardless of its results, HCZ’s success has garnered attention — and a lot of money. Its budget from government grants and philanthropies has ballooned from $6.7 million in 1996 to an estimated $66.3 million this year. This has allowed the Baby College’s staff to go from 20 in its infancy to 60 today, half of whom teach while the rest go door-to-door in the 97 blocks of Harlem that HCZ covers trying to get new mothers to come to classes.
But is it worthwhile to increase funding for a program that isn’t empirically proven to make children more school-ready? Fryer admitted that he used somewhat narrow metrics to gauge the success of the Baby College — testing scores by the time kids were ages 4 and 8 — and the study focused on HCZ as a whole rather than on particular programs.
It’s entirely possible that the parenting techniques learned in the Baby College are a powerful thrust of momentum early in life that must be sustained throughout all of a child’s formative years, and that without such early development, it’s harder for kids to gain as much from successive early-childhood programs.
Not that decreasing funding is even an issue. Besides, says Joseph, “We’re not a children’s program — we’re a parenting program.” And talking to parents like Teresa Harris, a 30-year-old mother-to-be, metrics of school preparedness fade in importance as she checks off a list of strategies she picked up from Baby College. “You have to play with your kids,” she says. “You don’t have to spank your children, and that’s where a lot of parents messed up. You have to keep up on your immunizations, make sure that stays correct, because there’s a lot of diseases here about now.”
This article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
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