Full name: Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America

Author: Paul Tough Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Education, Non Fiction, Biographies Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780547247960 0618569898 0547247966

What would it take?That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children—not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children’s Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives—their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time. Similar books: The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz Tested by Linda Perlstein The End of Education by Neil Postman In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol A Different Kind of Teacher by John Taylor Gatto The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol Letters to a Young Teacher by Jonathan Kozol 36 Children by Herbert Kohl Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch Fire in the Ashes by Jonathan Kozol There's More to Life Than This by Theresa Caputo The Duck Commander Family by Willie Robertson To Selena, with Love by Chris Perez The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle by Michael J. Mooney The Women of Duck Commander by Kay Robertson