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| Spring 1999 | |||||
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| Inside this issue | This issue of Inside the Challenge features recent activities and accomplishments of the "newest" of the large urban grants, the three arts programs, and five smaller urban projects. The achievements presented here include positive impacts on students, schools, and systems, as well as progress made by Challenge projects in crossing traditional educational boundaries--of schools and districts, states and universities--to facilitate reform, advance existing knowledge, and inspire new collaborations. |
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| Impacts on Students, Schools & Systems Building Expertise & New Partnerships Collaboration Across Projects "El Puente [Academy for Peace and Justice] is leading the way for the kind of 21st century we want for these children--and children around the world." -- Vice President Al Gore, during a visit to El Puente (a grantee of both New York's Center for Arts Education and New York Networks for School Renewal), in which he thanked students for their relief efforts on behalf of victims of Hurricane Mitch. -- Hoang Nguyen, Vietnamese native and 1998 Chelsea High School Senior Class Valedictorian, when asked to name a teacher who had been an inspiration to him.
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Impacts on Students, Schools & Systems | ||||
 Detroit's Challenge project, Schools of the 21st Century, is playing a critical role implementing recently passed state legislation mandating the replacement of that city's elected school board with a new reform panel. William Beckham, President of New Detroit, Inc. and board chair for Schools of the 21st Century, was one of Mayor Dennis Archer's six reform board appointees, a choice with which The Detroit News, in a subsequent editorial, "was particularly buoyed." Mayor Archer also has asked Schools of the 21st Century to head the transition team for advising the new board.A grant made by the South Florida Annenberg Challenge--to five Palm Beach County schools participating in a state-sponsored deregulation program--is already paying important dividends. Although the deregulation project is still in its infancy, officials have discovered that existing budget restrictions, intended to ensure the appropriate use of funds, have in fact limited what schools can accomplish. As district leaders learn more from the deregulated schools' experience, they are building in more flexibility for all schools--not just the five deregulated ones.The second year of Salt Lake City's district-wide Challenge effort focused on developing processes for using data as the foundation for improvement. To model a positive example, the Superintendent responded to concerns identified in survey data by re-organizing the central office--to make it more accessible, to improve accountability, and to facilitate communication and collaboration. In addition, the district expects its 36 schools to have completed, by the end of this academic year, a school profile--compiled by site teams using student achievement, attendance, disciplinary, and demographic data, as well as results of broadly distributed surveys. The profiles serve as the basis for developing school improvement plans and their eventual evaluation.In New York, UFT Vice President David Sherman recently commented on the impact of the Center for Arts Education: "We already can see dramatic changes in some schools." Fifth-graders at one such school, Brooklyn's P. S. 314, have been working with the Metropolitan Opera Guild on an original opera production to be premiered this spring. The young opera buffs heard Placido Domingo during a rehearsal of the Met's "Queen of Spades," which also connected to their study of Russian history. Researchers at the Harvard School of Education give the opera project high marks.In Chelsea, MA, preparing students for college is a high priority for the Boston University/Chelsea Partnership. In the past ten years, the percentage of seniors heading to college or other post-secondary experience has increased over 20 points, from 52 percent in 1989 to 74 percent in 1998. In just two years (1996-1998), the percentage of seniors taking advanced placement courses jumped from 7.8 to 59.4, with the number of students scoring a 3 or above rising from 0 to 17.Students at Minneapolis South High School have recently developed and performed in three 30-second public service announcements currently running on the Paragon 36 channel cable system. Produced as part of the Bravo Network's public affairs campaign called "Start Smart," each of the Annenberg spots provides a humorous, engaging take on the message: "The Arts Make You Smart." |
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| Chattanooga's Leadership Development Initiative--a district-wide effort to recruit, train, and support school principals--is enjoying wide-spread participation. In February, principals from 79 of Hamilton County's 81 schools attended a voluntary, weekend-long retreat in Atlanta. Guest facilitators--successful administrators from Chicago, Rochester, and District 2 in New York City--helped participants draft curriculum and develop strategies in areas essential to effective school leadership: accountability, human resources, developing direction, furthering knowledge, and building community.The Houston Annenberg Challenge recently joined forces with the Houston Endowment and Houston Independent School District to expand Project GRAD, a proven curricular, counseling, and scholarship program that prepares students for college. Three new inner-city feeder patterns--encompassing 60 schools and 49,000 students--will benefit from the over $9 million in expanded funding for the project. In addition to materials and teacher professional development for the programs in literacy, math, and classroom management, key Annenberg components will be added to this latest group of Project GRAD schools.In January, the Boston Annenberg Challenge kicked off a new initiative, Measuring Student Progress, designed to help schools internalize the use of data for continuous improvement. Nine schools are participating in four full-day training sessions this spring to sample various assessment instruments and design plans for implementing a comprehensive assessment program beginning in September. Other Annenberg schools will undergo similar training later this summer and fall.The impact of the Challenge program in Baltimore exceeds the relatively modest size of its grant ($1 million). The success there of the Annenberg-supported Compact Schools project has prompted the Baltimore City Public Schools to group 17 city schools into a special sub-district for Direct Instruction and Core Knowledge (major components of the Annenberg work). The district has appointed an area superintendent to oversee these activities and has pledged $50,000 per school to support staff development for implementing the programs.Cleveland's Newton D. Baker Elementary School, a grantee of the Transforming Education through the Arts Challenge (TETAC), has integrated music, dance, theater, and the visual arts into every subject area--not just as parts of the curriculum but as methods of assessment as well. State standardized test scores among the 90 percent lower-income, 72 percent African-American student body have risen steadily; last year Baker's scores ranked third in the district across the board. The arts program also has gained strong parental support. Last fall a "back-to-school-night" at the Cleveland Art Museum drew 600 family members, and parents are already pressuring the district to extend the integrated arts approach to the middle and high schools their children will next attend. |
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Building Expertise & New Partnerships | ||||
"While there is little doubt that all students can learn, educators have yet to demonstrate that all schools can achieve at high levels. The solution to this problem lies less in holding schools accountable for failure than it does in building schools' capacity for high performance. State and district inattention to this crucial capacity building will simply provide fuel to those interested in free-market solutions to school failure." -- Warren Simmons, Executive Director, Annenberg Institute for School Reform -- Consortium on Chicago School Research, in a report commissioned by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and quoted in Focus, newsletter of the Boston Annenberg Challenge -- Ten year-old Christian Starling, student at Detroit's Joyce Elementary School |
Last fall, the Urban Atlanta Coalition Compact held its third town meeting of school teams--plus parents, University Fellows, and other partners--from its seven participating schools. Roughly 175 attendees shared successful practices, work in progress, and a buffet dinner. The evening ended with a performance by a student tap team from John Hope Elementary School. In conjunction with the principals' union and Board of Education, New York City's Center for Arts Education hosted a leadership institute at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in February. Approximately 175 principals and district arts liaisons attended the day-long session, discussing strategies for initiating and sustaining school change through the arts. Topics ranged from budgeting and scheduling to curriculum, professional development, and community involvement. As part of its Parent Support for Literacy Initiative, the Boston Annenberg Challenge (BAC) has worked over the past year with the U.S. Department of Education to create The Compact for Reading Guide and Home Links/Book Links, 400 reading and writing lessons developed for parents' at-home use with their children. BAC schools will select and train Parent Liaisons this spring and summer to organize Home Links/Book Links activities, create school Compacts for Reading, and evaluate parent participation within the school. Next fall, Challenge schools also will offer parents mini-grants ($100 maximum) to purchase books for the home. The Houston Annenberg Challenge is capitalizing on the structure of its grants program, which groups grantees into two categories: Beacon Schools, with proven records of success, and Lamplighter Schools, those on the road to reform. Since last fall, the Challenge has sponsored with various partners three institutes for principals, teachers, and coaches in Lamplighter Schools. In November and March, principals from Beacon Schools shared with Lamplighter colleagues their experiences and learning on such topics as budgeting, communicating with parents, moving from theory to action, and harnessing reform around a focused effort. Roughly 100 Chattanooga parent volunteers and coordinators gathered in March for a training institute devoted to the school system's new standards. Led by Education Trust's Stephanie Robinson, the day-long session furthered parents' understanding of the system's standards, including clarifying connections between the standards and children's schoolwork. In turn, participating parents will offer similar workshops in their own school communities throughout the spring. The Minneapolis Arts project has completed mid-year interviews of teams from all its participating schools. Conducted by evaluators from the University of Minnesota research consortium, interview questions focused on four areas where the project hopes to see positive change: students; teachers and schools; district policy-making; and relationships among schools, parents, and communities. The interviews have been transcribed, coded, and returned to each school to use as a tool for reflecting on progress and for planning next year's work. Teachers will be surveyed during each of the remaining three years of the project. The South Florida Annenberg Challenge (SFAC) has launched with the state Department of Education a new Professional Development Initiative intended to strengthen training for both teachers and school administrators. The program is assisting Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach Counties as they develop much needed training materials--interactive, video, and on-line resources for teachers to use as their schedules allow. It also is establishing professional development schools and helping school districts modify their teacher evaluation systems. A recent SFAC evaluation report notes that the program "has opened possibilities for SFAC's funded projects to be pilot sites for initiatives that could have state-wide impact." In December, Chelsea's Intergenerational Literacy Project (ILP) celebrated its tenth anniversary with over 400 former learners and staff members. In the past decade, 3,000 parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents--from 40 countries, speaking over 20 languages--have participated in the program to boost literacy among Chelsea's immigrant families. Representatives from current classes addressed the guests, and former learners and instructors shared their memories of the program. Previous staff members made financial gifts to the ILP and donated children's books for the project's library. |
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Collaboration Across Projects | ||||
"Do students just spontaneously combust into story and dance and learning? Generally not. Such things happen because we are intentional about seeing to it that they do happen. The 32 Annenberg schools in Minneapolis are each being intentional in their commitment to integrating the arts fully into the lives and learning of children." -- Judy Hornbacher, Director, Arts Education and Partnership, Minneapolis Public Schools |
In early May, the Challenge and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) hosted the third Challenge Practitioners Conference, "Using and Sharing Data for School Improvement," outside Salt Lake City. Approximately 140 participants--staff, researchers, and school teams from 13 of the 18 Challenge projects, along with AISR personnel and national experts in accountability--gathered to share strategies for collecting, analyzing, and acting on data. Bolstering a sense of continuity, 15 of the 24 school teams attending participated in last year's event. Teams new to the conference provided fresh perspectives, with a special focus on ways to include families and community members in their efforts to review and act on evidence. The three Challenge Arts projects are working together to share successful strategies for integrating the arts into curricula and schools. Last December, at the invitation of The Getty Education Institute for the Arts, Hollis Headrick and Laurie Tisch Sussman, of New York City's Center for Arts Education, spoke in Los Angeles to a blue ribbon arts education committee about the challenges of improving arts education in a large urban system. In January, David O'Fallon, of the Minnesota Center for Arts Education, and The Getty's Vicki Rosenberg made presentations to over 450 teachers, administrators, arts partners, and parents attending the Center for Arts Education's Promising Practices Conference in New York. Several "newer" Challenge projects are taking advantage of their counterparts' experiences in earlier Annenberg efforts. In May, teachers and Challenge staff from the Baltimore and Atlanta projects visited each other's schools to share successful strategies for educating African-American students, while a team of teachers and administrators from Salt Lake City traveled to Santa Clara for the Bay Area's annual Collaborative Assembly. Last fall, educators from Houston toured eight New York Networks schools to compare programs and policies. In February, project directors and researchers from the large urban and rural programs met in Houston for the ninth Challenge cross-site meeting. Participants reviewed a draft Challenge interim evaluation report (focusing on the first six Challenge projects) and discussed its implications for both the program and evaluation in each site. The subsequent release in April of Citizens Changing Their Schools: A Midterm Report on the Annenberg Challenge marked the culmination of an extended collaborative process that began last July in Dedham, MA with a week-long writing session of researchers, project staff, and advisors. In addition, financial officers from 12 Challenge projects gathered in Ft. Lauderdale in April with national Annenberg staff for their third cross-site meeting. A volunteer committee of Challenge site communications staff--from the Bay Area, Minnesota Arts, New York Networks, and Rural projects, along with the national office--is preparing a national public opinion survey on a variety of education issues--from school funding and equity to professional development. Organizers hope to spotlight and test public attitudes towards principles and strategies embraced by the Challenge. |
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Inside the Annenberg Challenge
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