At Harlem program, a renaissance in education

NEW YORK — Take a slight bend past the entrance, and a new student at the Harlem Educational Activities Fund in uptown Manhattan sees 43 laminated college acceptance letters, neatly placed in rows and columns. Doris Davis was accepted to Cornell. Crissaris Sarnelli got into Swarthmore. Fausto Emmanuel Jimenez could have gone to Amherst, but he chose Columbia.

An after-school program that draws its 325 minority students from the poor areas of Harlem and Washington Heights, HEAF sends 75 percent of its eighth graders to top New York City public schools like Stuyvesant and 90 percent of its 12th graders to college, compared to the area's attendance rate in the low teens. Four classes have graduated college and now are engaged in various careers.

These results show, the fund's leaders declare, that they have discovered how to close the big achievement gap in American education at a time when education remains a top political issue and the Supreme Court will decide whether affirmative action violates the Constitution.

But HEAF faces obstacles in proving that their educational way is best and in securing lasting funding so the program can be expanded and replicated.

Asked who is making a major contribution toward improving the country but is being largely overlooked, University professor Cornel West GS '80, who speaks often on race and education, cited Daniel Rose, a millionaire real estate mogul who founded HEAF in 1989.

Universities nationwide have tried to include more diverse student bodies and to make up for the achievement gap by offering students chances they might not otherwise have. If HEAF succeeds at expanding and replicating, it may help close the gap even before the college application process begins.

No HEAF student has yet attended the University, but several have attended Ivy League schools.

Overall, HEAF students attend 70 colleges nationwide. The morning of the Yale-Princeton game last fall, Rose had breakfast with Yale University President Richard Levin and a HEAF student who was just starting her freshman year at Yale.

"If HEAF starts with a kid at the seventh grade, 10 years later we will give you a graduate of Columbia, Yale, Haverford or Bryn Mawr," Rose said in an interview on his 73rd birthday last year. "We are preparing them to compete successfully in a world that's increasingly meritocratic, credentialed and color neutral."

According to government statistics for people 25 to 29, whites edge out blacks by 7 percent in high school completion and by about 16 percent in college completion. In the same category, whites edge out Hispanics by about 32 percent in high school completion and 24 percent in college completion.

Beginnings

A student enters HEAF as early as the fifth grade. For the next 12 years, he is coddled and nurtured by the fund — taking part in academics, character development, literary groups and other activities. As the eighth grade approaches, students prepare for admission tests to New York City's special public schools, and throughout high school, they receive guidance and support in making the right choices to get into college and pay for it. During college they continue to receive support.

In one character development group last year, 10 HEAF fifth graders were playing a game called "All my neighbors who," a version of musical chairs in which everybody who agrees with what the person in the middle says switches chairs.

Natalie went first. "All my neighbors who hate school," she said. Nobody budged, but Ebony remarked, "I like school."

The point of the group, according to Marle McGee, its adult leader, is to develop self-esteem.

What's that?

"Believing in yourself," Daniel said, while Jeffrey thought it is "a sense of uniqueness."

The key to HEAF's success, Rose said, is twofold. First, it targets what it considers the neglected middle, neither students who cannot read at grade level nor students who are so advanced they will succeed without help. Second, it tries to instill into children values about education and about themselves.

"HEAF focuses on those kids we can help make it," Rose said. Instead of stressing such things as class size, testing and computers, he added, HEAF emphasizes the "learning that takes place inside the head of the child."

The 12-year program is not cheap, and a large part of the bill has been footed by Rose's personal fortune. The fund spends between $40,000 and $50,000 per student over the 12 years. Students pay nothing. Now Rose wants to make the fund and its roughly $1.5 million annual budget more self-sustaining, but he said he won't be likely to get any help from government.

"The government group wants mass programming with very low per-capita costs," he said, also noting that large foundations are more interested in "theory than results." Programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance, he added, only offer a chance for a few students to get placed in private schools with scholarships, and he suggested that HEAF's advantage is that it leaves the students in the public school system.

Rose said HEAF is undertaking "Herculean" efforts to get new funding and is having some success. A fund-raising director, Coleen Dremus, was hired early last year, and Danielle Lee, HEAF executive director, said funding was her main priority. Many government officials may quibble with Rose's assertions about American education. But according to the director of the Institute of Urban and Minority Education at Columbia University, Edmund Gordon, who had not heard of HEAF, they are broadly true.

There is a feeling to "let the people at the middle sort of fend for themselves," he said. "We could bring everyone up from the bottom and still have minority folk underrepresented."

Gordon noted that President Bush's "Leave No Child Behind" program may ameliorate the situation somewhat. It frees community boards to form youth agencies, expands funding for youth development and job training and increases funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, letting more children take part in after-school programs.

A strain of thought running through HEAF's philosophy is that it will succeed where public education has failed because it offers a sanctuary to students.

"In many public schools, certainly in deprived areas, you destroy the atmosphere for learning in the classroom not by banishing the bad, but by gibing the willing enthusiastic student," Rose said. "The problem in the school system is that they keep the disruptive students in the class."

A history to build on

On one wall of the reception area at HEAF headquarters is a red Harlem Renaissance poster that displays Ivie Anderson, one of Duke Ellington's original backup singers, and other notables of the Jazz Age. Juxtaposed are prominently displayed pictures of championship chess teams, one of the feats that HEAF likes to brag about.

When HEAF started, it partnered with two public schools in Harlem, Public School 76 and the already advanced Mott School. HEAF turned PS 76's reading scores from the worst into the best in Harlem and started with Mott a chess team that became known as the Dark Knights.

During the interview, Rose glared at a picture of the Knights — all of them minorities — declaring, "Not in jazz. Not in basketball. But in chess."

He gloated of the Knights' victories in the junior New York state chess championships in May, not just over the Russian Jews from Brighton Beach or the Koreans from Astoria, Queens, but most of all, a New York City private school, Dalton.

Pointing to the picture, he said, "I think it's a good, healthy thing for society not just to pay lip service, but to understand that kids that look like that can be number one."

The fund speaks proudly of one of its newest board members, Sean Scott, who was also its first college graduate. Scott attended Yale, received his doctorate at Albert Einstein Medical School and now is an intern at Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine. He plans to return to Harlem to open a practice.

Several other board members include Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, Sheri Berman, a Princeton politics professor until recently, and Calvin Sims, a New York Times correspondent who is a visiting professor of the Humanities Council this term.

Challenges for the fund remain. In addition to becoming financially independent, Lee said it's necessary for HEAF "to build on the experience of students each year in a fresh way that doesn't duplicate" what they had before. This includes, she said, creating more cohesion as students enter new parts of the HEAF program from grade to grade.

After self-sufficiency, she said, HEAF hopes to go beyond the 20 partners it has in its community and reach out farther. Asked about what to do with students who are not even in the middle, Lee responded that there were plenty of remediation programs already available in the area.

Gregory Hyde, a Harlem high school senior, has attended HEAF since the seventh grade. He is applying to several colleges, including Morehouse College and Carnegie Mellon University, and plans to study political science. He said HEAF has made the application process much less stressful.

"I did not appreciate HEAF when I was young," he said. "But I understand it is for the better."

So what does HEAF do for these students?

"We're better people," Hyde said. "We might have been inclined to take a different course, but it keeps us focused."