Where does the education lie?

Education is getting boring. Not the classes and the teachers, but the stuff that goes on outside of the school building - the constant partisan bickering about how best to fix the country's ailing schools, the squabbling over funding and budgets, the unending talk of reforms that always fail to happen. To be sure, a handful of people have made some headway into the bureaucracy, but for the most part, the system has remained relatively stagnant.

Stagnant is not good, given the state of education in this country. It is not good when black and Hispanic students are regularly performing worse than their white and Asian peers, and it is not good when we're facing a multitude of crumbling, underfinanced inner-city schools. If the system is stagnant, then the millions of kids who grow up in low-income areas and attend less-than-functional schools have no hope of escaping the poverty into which they were born.

This has been a problem for years. Now, we have a very real solution.

Our prototype is the Harlem Children's Zone, 97 city blocks serving over 10,000 kids in New York City. Spearheaded by President and CEO Geoffrey Canada, the Zone is unique in that it doesn't just focus on education - its programs range from child care to crime prevention to health and fitness. The idea is that you can't beat poverty by just fixing a couple of schools - you've got to fix the community as well.

Canada started the Zone as a one-block pilot back in the 90s, and over the years it has grown nearly 100-fold. The basics have stayed the same, but Canada and his team have launched a host of new programs along the way. If you're a third grader in the Zone, your parents were probably enrolled in "Baby College" (established in 2001), where they got vital counseling on how to take care of their newborns. If you're a third grader in the Zone, you probably got a jump start on education with the Harlem Gems preschool program (2001), and you now attend a high-quality charter school (2004) - either Promise Academy I or Promise Academy II (the other three academies currently serve middle and high school students).

If you're a third grader in the Zone, it's also likely that you're outscoring some of the more affluent kids in the city. One hundred percent of the third graders at Promise Academy II were deemed at or above grade level on a 2008 statewide math test, as were 97 percent of the third graders at Promise Academy I. These are schools entirely composed of minority students (90 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic), a third of whom are eligible for free or reduced lunch. And this success is not limited to elementary school. Nationwide, only seven percent of black eight graders are on level in math - but 97.4 percent of Promise Academy eight graders are at or above grade level in the subject.

There is real potential here. We expand programs like this, get some significant federal funding and it's only a matter of time before the achievement gap as we know it bites the dust. Just think of all that could be done for urban education if the government got behind programs like these.

As of 2009, that situation is no longer a fantasy. It's gone widely unnoticed, but somewhere along the campaign trail, then-Senator Obama pledged to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the nation. It is absolutely imperative that we hold our President to his word. If the principles of the Zone work in Harlem, there's no reason to think that they can't do the same over in troubled D.C. or Baltimore City schools, or in the rest of the country.

The only conceivable argument against such a plan is that it's expensive - to cover all 20 cities, the program would cost an estimated few billion dollars a year. With the current budget crisis, critics say, helping these kids is something that we can't afford.

This is nonsense, for two reasons. First of all, the money is a solid investment - we help these kids get the education they need to escape poverty now, and we won't have to waste billions on prison and welfare programs later. And second, such a program is easily affordable if we just get our priorities in order and redistribute some of the money that we're already spending.

Let's put things in perspective: the $46 million that the Harlem Children's Zone spends each year is about what the war in Iraq costs taxpayers every four hours. We could even work with education funds alone and actually save some cash - the per pupil spending in the ailing D.C. schools tops $13,000, while the Zone manages to get much better results for just around $3,500. We don't have to spend more - we just have to spend wisely. Is that too much to ask?

So let's review. We have a program that's been proven to help the urban poor excel in school. We have a president who has expressed interest in expanding it. The only thing standing in the way of getting this done is the same thing that caused Obama's pledge to go largely unnoticed in the first place - a simple lack of interest. Not enough people seem to know, and of those who do, not enough seem to care. Let it be known that as of 2009, we have the tools to fix education, and we have the power to use them. History will not treat us kindly if we let this opportunity slip through the cracks.

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