Geoffrey Canada At HuffPost's Game Changers Event: "We Better Educate All These Kids And Put Them To Work" (ORIGINAL VIDEO)

Geoffrey Canada gave a moving speech at The Huffington Post's 2010 Game Changers celebration at Skylight Studios in Soho on Thursday night. Canada, who founded The Harlem Children's Zone, a non-profit that provides education and social-service programs to children and families, was voted the Ultimate Game Changer in Impact by Huffington Post readers.

Here's a sample from Canada's speech, which you can watch in full, below:

I can take you places that have been failing our children in this country for 40 or 50 years, and there is nothing that has changed. The same thing they did 30 years ago that didn't work, they're going to do today. And we can't have that in this country. We've gotta guarantee all of our kids an education.

I keep reminding Americans, someone's got to pay the bill for this deficit that we're running up. We better educate all these kids and put them to work.

WATCH:

Comments

[mrskorn]

09:17 PM on 11/03/2010

I read somewhere that he kicked out a whole class of students because their scores were not high enough. So much for educating all children! We'll work with them as long as they make our school look good.

[frank day]

06:36 PM on 11/02/2010

Put them to work where?

Where is this 'new economy' we've been promised for the past two decades

[Criticallthinker1974]

12:41 AM on 11/02/2010

The key words here are ALL CHILDREN. That includes the LEP and special education kids that are typically dismissed from charters and turnarounds. That includes the kids who maybe are not so good at rote memorization and filling in the right bubbles. That includes the budding artists and musicians whose creativity is stifled by standardized measurements. That includes the kids who have parents who can not afford to send their kids half way across the city to a charter school or are just not motivated enough to fill out a lengthy charter school application. That includes the kids who don't win some demoralizing lottery. That includes the kids who attend worse schools of which, many are charters because their neighborhood school was closed. Yes. ALL CHILDREN deserve an education.

[AccuracyInReading]

11:34 PM on 11/01/2010

The Harlem Children's Zone may be a non-profit organization but it doesn't mean it's without resources. According to an article by Diane Ravitch "The Myth of Charter Schools" "Canada has a board of wealthy philanthropists and a very successful fund-raising apparatus. With assets of more than $200 million, his organization has no shortage of funds. Canada himself is currently paid $400,000 annually." See the complete article at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?page=2

$200 million in assets should be able to educate a bit more than 2 charter schools' worth of kids and get them working.

[Julie Cavanagh]

05:36 PM on 11/01/2010

I wonder what Mr. Canada has to say about his own schools failing children. From what I understand, when a group of his students didn't get the test scores his board wanted, they dismissed them from the school. I also understand two of HCZ schools got C's on this year's NYC accountability report cards. I don't note these two things to undermine the "school as center of community" concept, which was Mr. Canada's focus in the beginning (and I hope still is)... I say this because Mr. Canada talks a lot about schools that are failing kids, but his schools do not serve ALL children. His schools dismiss children. And many, many public schools are outperforming the schools he touts.

[AccuracyInReading]

11:37 PM on 11/01/2010

From the same Diane Ravitch article noted above discussing the film "Waiting for 'Superman': "But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about 'amazing results,' even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Har- lem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009). "

Again, the link to the full article is http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?page=2

[Live4literacy]

01:05 PM on 11/02/2010

Exactly... public schools do not get to dismiss the kids that don't make the grade, or who are learning disabled, or who are just average...

[Kimiko Austin-Rijs]

04:02 PM on 11/01/2010

I am not so worried about what the Tea Party wants to do. I am a Democrate and consider myself progressive but I am quite shocked and nervous about what havoc my fellow, corperate worshiping liberal democrats will create. They have been behaving with particular vileness as of late.