From the start, Mr. Annenberg made it clear that he hoped the lion's share of his resources would support schools where education was most threatened: in our nation's largest urban school districts, the very places many education activists and onlookers deemed beyond repair. Not only do these districts enroll a disproportionate share of our country's youngsters - 25 percent of all school children reside in just 100 of the largest school districts - but they also offer, unquestionably, some of the biggest challenges. In a recent book, Ghetto Schooling, the author Jean Anyon cites a litany of statistics that underscore the plight of urban schools. Anyon notes:

Total public school enrollment in the United States is about 38 million. Of these, 10.4 million students are in urban, 16.8 million in suburban, and 10.5 million in rural schools. City demographics are reflected in the enrollments in urban schools. Most (approximately 70%) of the students in American's central city schools are African American or Latino. In school year 1992-93, fifty of the Great City School districts enrolled 5.7 million students, including 36.1% of our nation's African American students, 29.8% of our Hispanic students, and only 4.8% of our white students. These districts enrolled 13.5% of the nation's students, but 22.1% of the nation's poor and 35.9% of the nation's students with limited English proficiency.

Nationally, 42% of urban students are eligible to receive subsidized school lunches, and 40% attend schools defined by the U.S. Department of Education as high-poverty schools, in which more than 40% of students receive free or reduced-price lunch. Against these figures, only 10% of suburban students and 25% of rural students attend high-poverty schools. If present trends continue, the United States will, in twenty-five years, have a majority of "minority" students in its public schools, enrolling most of the black and Hispanic students in the large cities, with more than half of them living in poverty.

Less than half of the ninth graders entering high schools in our large city systems typically graduate in four years; urban drop-out rates for low-income African-American and Hispanic students, already high, increased between 1990 and 1993. Less than half of urban students are above national achievement norms. The large percentage of students needing special services or programs strain city school budgets, in some cases accounting for up to one quarter of expenses.

Despite greater need, 79% of large city districts studied by the Council of Great City Schools are funded at a lower rate than are suburban schools; nationally, advantaged suburban schools spend as much as ten times that spent by urban poor schools. A full 82.4% of the Great City School districts experienced a decline in local revenues during the survey year of 1992-93....

Old school buildings, many dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have not been well maintained. Classrooms typically have few instructional supplies and little equipment.... Students in urban schools have only a 50% chance of being taught by a certified mathematics or science teacher.

Research has shown that instruction in inner city schools is often based on cognitively low-level, unchallenging, rote material. Members of the Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust relate their dismay at witnessing "English classrooms [in urban schools] where fourteen-year-olds were assigned to color the definitions to a list of vocabulary words and required to recite - over and over again - the parts of speech." Although high percentages of city students need supplementary academic instruction, there is a 50% higher shortage of teachers in cities than the national average.

- Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform, pp. 6-7. (Note: citations from the original text have been omitted here. Interested readers should see Anyon's book for statistical references).

It is against this backdrop that participants in the Challenge's urban sites conduct their daily affairs.

Bay Area
The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC) - supported by $25 million from William R. Hewlett and the Hewlett Foundation, $25 million from Mr. Annenberg, and an additional $50 million in matching funds - spans 740,000 students in over 1,200 schools from 118 school districts across six counties. This vast project has two main objectives: to support and encourage a core group of 100 schools and their districts to take a leadership role in whole-school reform and to create a formal Learning Collaborative comprised of Bay Area schools, districts, and support organizations. Because BASRC believes that schools will improve only once those working in and around them learn new, different, and better ways of operating, the Collaborative sponsors "learning communities" of schools, districts, support providers, and funders that engage in cycles of inquiry, leading to new approaches for improving schools.

In order to qualify for BASRC "leadership" funding, schools and their districts must first become members of the Collaborative. Applicants submit a portfolio that documents both a vision of reform consistent with BASRC's and the concrete steps already taken towards that vision. Panels of peer reviewers evaluate admission portfolios using criteria developed collaboratively by teachers, administrators, and local school reformers. Praised by both applicants and reviewers as a valuable learning opportunity, the portfolio process also reflects BASRC's belief in the importance of engaging in real work - in this case, transforming the administrative task of selecting members to the Collaborative into a productive professional development experience. To date, membership in the Collaborative includes 208 schools, fifty-seven districts, twenty-seven support providers, and two county offices of education.

The Collaborative offers a unique structure - one in which schools, districts, county offices of education, universities, reform organizations, and other agencies identify together the crucial issues faced by a large number of schools. The Collaborative also provides significant resources to research these issues on behalf of the region as a whole. In this way, BASRC hopes to broaden the work of both schools and the support system to find new solutions to common problems. If in the process the Collaborative succeeds in creating a regional culture of in-depth, professional conversation and inquiry, learning communities will be institutionalized at all levels of the education system, ensuring that reform will endure beyond the five-year life of the Challenge.

BASRC is governed by a twenty-three- member board of trustees and administered by a staff of twenty-five.