"The Harlem Miracle"

"The Harlem Miracle"

This New York Times article by Brooks is about the Harlem School Zone, an educational program in New York City that transformed the lives of low-income children by addressing their specific needs through an understanding of the disenfranchised communities the children came from. The article additionally, yet seemingly unintentionally, depicts the increasing cost of gaining a higher education and the way that the university is again becoming an institution of the elite instead of a tool in upward mobility within the United States. Institutions of higher learning do not meet the needs of the low-income student and without programs like the Harlem School Zone the low-income student is not properly equipped with the institutional savvy to to navigate the university. However the problem goes beyond education; the reproduction of class status within our society is an issue that must be addressed at the institutional level in order to bring about true longstanding change. 

 

The use of education as a poverty alleviation tool depicts how reformers like Brooks believe that widespread institutional level programs are not necessary to achieve goals in societal transformation. After having read the piece by Katz I see that the Harlem School Zone program stops at the People level of poverty alleviation. Brooks as well as the Harlem School Zone program assumes that the success of the students is in large part due to the inculcation of "middle-class values" to the poor students. This postulation places poverty as a problem of the individual and consequently there is no addressing of how the miracle of Harlem can be incorporated to the entire nation.