On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Geoffrey Canada, president of the Harlem Children’s Zone, was the Stone Social Impact Forum speaker at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.

In the audience were Amy O’Leary, the director of Strategies for Children’s Early Education for All Campaign, and Titus DosRemedios, Strategies’ director of research and policy.

Amy asked Canada about investing in early education. Here’s an edited version of their exchange.

Amy: “What is it going to take for us to change our priorities and invest more earlier to get the bigger outcome later?”

Canada: “The science on this is really clear, [but] we’ve got science that is not driving policy, and I think this is going to be another one of these movements. It’s one of the reasons that we are trying to advocate for comprehensive, cradle to career [approaches], which does not mean pre-K to career. It means cradle to career.

“The science on this stuff is really clear, what happens to those young brains when kids are six months, one year. And if you’re in communities where people don’t know how to stimulate those brains appropriately, that’s going to put that kid at a disadvantage. So the question is: What is it going to take? It’s going to take us not giving up.

“People think it’s outlandish: Where would you ever get the money to pay for that? But Mayor de Blasio in New York decided, after everybody else said it couldn’t be done, that he was going to do universal pre-K. He just decided it… and he did it. We have universal pre-K in New York. But the point is that everybody said they couldn’t do it . Everybody else had excuses why they couldn’t do it, and he just did it.”

“And New York City is no poorer. There’s no one missing anything in New York City because we decided to do pre-K for all the kids. This is part of the challenge: In the Bronx, we used to call it the old okey-doke. It’s like if you’re playing basketball, you only had one move, right, a head fake. And people kept going for it. You’d be like, Don’t go for the okey-doke; it’s the same move.

We go for the okey-doke: We can’t afford it, right? It’s simply not true. You will see that this is a matter of public will, and are we prepared to fight for stuff?”

“This time in our national politics, if there is one thing it has taught us, it’s that there are a lot of politicians who will do anything to stay in office. Even sell out their own country just to stay in office. So this idea that, Could you get them to do the right thing? Yeah, if you put enough pressure on them, you could get them to do the right thing, but we have to be organized to be able to get that done.”

To learn more, watch the video. And visit the Kennedy Institute, it’s an amazing place.