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Preface: Who We Are Overview: Multiple Paths with Multiple Strengths Matching Grants Outright Grants  Grant Terms, National Coordination, and Ongoing Evaluation of ProgressAppendix: Tables |
Grant Terms, National Coordination, and Ongoing Progress The majority of the Challenge grants are for a five-year period, although a few are for three years (e.g., New American Schools, Chelsea). The grant to the Annenberg Institute includes both operating funds and endowment. Grant contracts are with the Annenberg Foundation, and grant payments are tied to progress and the raising of matching funds. No more than 10 percent of grant funds can be spent on administration or overhead. Ninety percent of the funds must benefit directly schools or programs targeted at schools. The matching requirements vary. The grants to NAS, ECS, and the Annenberg Institute do not require matching funds, but rather build upon substantial investments already in place. The grants to urban school districts include a one-for-one match in Los Angeles and a three-for-one match in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the remaining urban grants requiring two local dollars for every one that Annenberg provides. The arts grants to New York City and Minnesota are also two-for-one. Given the relative paucity of private funders in rural education, the grant for rural school reform requires a one-for-one match. In all instances, no more than 50 percent of the matching dollars can be from public resources; the remainder must be private. As a rule, grant recipients have created a governing board to provide programmatic, administrative, and fiscal oversight for their Challenge efforts. These governing boards include leaders from the philanthropic, business, and university communities as well as, in some cases, public officials and representatives from the school district. Since one function of these boards is to award Challenge funds, all have been required to draft conflict-of-interest policies. A board of directors governs NAS. A five-member advisory panel reviews ECS's work in connection with the dissemination of NAS. The Annenberg Institute is advised by a board of overseers, appointed by Brown University's president. |
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National Coordination The Challenge's urban, rural, and arts programs began as a set of separate grant initiatives, each pursuing its own ambitious agenda. Since then, the Challenge has evolved into a bona fide national program. Project directors and researchers from the large urban and rural sites meet semi-annually to update one another on their site's progress and to explore issues of common concern. The smaller Challenge sites, as well as the three arts projects, have begun meeting regularly, too. Project directors participate in monthly conference calls as well. Moreover, a series of occasional papers, focused especially on evaluation issues, has been launched. The Challenge Journal, a periodical aimed at practitioners in Challenge-supported schools and appearing three times a year, just finished its first full year of publication. The first issue, "Community and Critical Friendships: School Change As Everybody's Work," examines the ways Challenge sites are breaching old boundaries to connect school to school, school to community, and schools to others who can support their work. The second issue explores what schools participating in the Rural Challenge can teach urban systems. The third issue, "Looking at Learning Across the Map: How to Tell if Schools are Changing," describes different ways schools assess their progress and that of their students. A national coordinator and small staff, housed at the Annenberg Institute, oversee these various cross-site efforts as well as acting as a liaison between grant recipients and the Annenberg Foundation. In keeping with its mission of supporting and promoting school reform efforts across the country, the Annenberg Institute continues to serve as a resource for the various Challenge sites where appropriate. Staff at the Institute, for example, helped train forty "coaches" this past summer in Los Angeles; these coaches are now leading "critical friends groups" of teachers and principals in schools belonging to LAAMP school families. Teachers and principals in Challenge schools participate in the Institute's National School Reform Faculty. The Institute is hosting a meeting this spring of practitioners from Challenge sites. The meeting will focus on strategies schools can use to generate, analyze, and use data to improve instruction; one by-product of the meeting will be a handbook showcasing "best practices" in relation to school-level data collection and use. Challenge sites are also involved in the Institute's public engagement program. The Institute serves as a link to the cross-site evaluation of the Challenge by helping shape the dimensions of its evaluation and learn from its findings. |
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Evaluation Challenge grant recipients are responsible for evaluating and documenting the ongoing results of their efforts. The RAND Corporation has conducted the evaluation of New American Schools since its inception. The Annenberg Institute weaves evaluation into all its major programs. In each of the large urban sites, a research team drawn from local universities has developed a comprehensive evaluation plan in consultation with the local Challenge leadership. Guiding these plans is a set of shared expectations, developed jointly across the sites. Each site, for example, is expected to use a mix of evaluation strategies and to record and attribute changes that may result from Challenge activities at multiple levels. These levels must include student outcomes (intellectual, social, ethical), instructional practices and school climate, school networks, relationships to school districts, and relationships between schools and supporting institutions or partners and the surrounding community. Each site has agreed to formulate the theories of action (the beliefs and assumptions) that infuse its efforts and then to evaluate the degree to which it lives out these theories, as well as the degree to which these theories yield their intended effects or produce other significant effects. Another expectation is that each site's evaluation strategy will add in some lasting way to the capacity of individual schools to use data to make decisions. A comparable set of expectations guides the evaluation of the rural project as well as the arts initiatives. Complementing these site-based evaluations is a cross-site evaluation. Its goals are several. First, it seeks to capture and then, more importantly, learn from the similarities and differences in what is being attempted in the various sites and why; in addition, it seeks to find out how and why these attempts fare as they do. Second, it seeks to provide feedback to individual sites from those more removed from them, thereby strengthening the work in individual sites. Third, as much as possible, it seeks to secure cooperation, communication, and shared insight across sites. Finally, it seeks to understand and assess the Challenge's overall worth, its lessons, and its legacies. The cross-site evaluation is the collective work of the local research teams and Challenge directors, led by a small national team. Challenge researchers and directors, as noted earlier, meet semi-annually to discuss progress and common concerns. Challenge researchers have met separately as well: for example, a handful of researchers from urban sites attended this past summer's Rural Rendezvous, using it as an occasion to develop a shared framework for looking at student work, a component of each site's evaluation. In addition, a program of cross-site visits is gathering steam. In this program, a small cross-site team of researchers and project leaders spends three days in a site, learning as much as possible about what is happening in relation to the Challenge at the district and community level, at the school network level, and in individual schools. A panel of Challenge researchers and directors addressed last year's annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Another session is planned for this year's AERA gathering. Over the winter and spring of 1998, individual sites will make available preliminary findings on the Challenge's impact locally. In the summer of 1998, researchers from the large urban and rural sites - along with the small team coordinating the cross-site research - will join forces to write a national interim report on the Challenge. |
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