Walter H. Annenberg's Challenge to the Nation

It is classrooms like Fortuna's in South Philadelphia that Walter Annenberg hoped to champion when he announced at the White House in December 1993 his $500 million Challenge to reform the nation's schools. Befitting its name, this extraordinary gesture by Mr. Annenberg was intended to be a challenge on many fronts: educational, moral, political, and financial. He hoped to support schools in those places where they seemed most threatened: notably, major urban areas - places that tested acutely our commitment as a democratic nation to educate all students well.

In the four years since Mr. Annenberg unwrapped what President Clinton called his "wonderful Christmas present to American's children," local coalitions throughout the country - composed of local foundations, university and business leaders, school heads, and reformers - have put in motion their own unique plans to bring more classrooms like Mary Ann Fortuna's to life. A total of twenty-one grants, supporting work in some of the nation's largest school districts as well as smallest, now completes the Annenberg Challenge portfolio.

The overview that follows offers a glimpse of their individual, yet joined, stories, as well as a glimpse of the Challenge overall. Some of these stories, it should be remembered, involve grants awarded only in the past year. Since their stories are just beginning to unfold, center stage belongs to those who have been at their Annenberg work for two or more years. In subsequent reports this balance will shift. More detailed descriptions of each grant follow this overview.

Different Starting Points, Similar Goals
An abiding tenet of the Annenberg Challenge since its inception -- one that distinguishes it from other major school reform initiatives -- is its embrace of pluralism. Believing that there is no magic bullet, no single panacea, for fixing what ails our nation's most troubled schools, the Challenge has eschewed privileging one reform strategy over another. Rather, like all pluralist efforts, the Challenge accommodates an array of theories, in this case about how change occurs in schools and in the systems of which they are a part. And like all pluralist efforts, its constituent elements are characterized by both similarities and differences.

"One of the things that sets the Challenge apart is its respect for local definition and ownership," says one member of the South Florida Annenberg board. "It has allowed local coalitions to plan and carry out projects that are responsive to local circumstances. Some may view this as a weakness. We see it as a strength." Thus, while the Challenge endorses a shared vision of good schools -- schools where Mary Ann Fortuna's classroom is the norm; where teachers and principals, joined by the surrounding community, know their students well, challenge all children academically, and value thoughtful citizenship -- it encourages multiple starting points for bringing good schools to fruition. And it encourages starting points rooted in local conditions.

The New York Networks plan, for example, is uniquely "New York" -- a result of its extensive experience with small alternative schools -- whereas the Philadelphia plan is uniquely "Philadelphia" -- a result of its extraordinary effort to redesign the big-city school system. Recognizing the umbilical chord that connects rural schools and their communities, the Rural Challenge speaks of creating "a pedagogy of place." The Chattanooga project translates a citizens' vote to combine city and county school districts into an entirely new school system. The Atlanta plan puts the historically black colleges that ring Atlanta at the center of its efforts to improve the teaching of African-American children. The New York City Arts project, by linking schools with the city's abundant artistic and cultural wealth, hopes to stop a downward spiral in arts education.

Is a common vision of good schools the only glue uniting Challenge grant recipients? No. Like members of a family, Challenge sites share a genetic inheritance reflected in a set of core beliefs. They all believe in school-level inventiveness, small learning communities, and classroom practice and continuous professional development as linchpins of change. They believe in linking schools to one another and supporting them with external partners. They value setting high academic standards, expanding notions around accountability, and balancing district-level leadership with school-level autonomy. What varies is how each puts these beliefs into practice.

"What does the Challenge reward?" one school superintendent recently asked. It rewards collaboration. It rewards connecting schools and communities. It rewards organizational learning and linking adult learning to children's learning. And it rewards schools sharing their work publicly.

The Arc of the Work
At a recent cross-site meeting of Challenge site directors and researchers, Toni Haas, co-director of the Rural Challenge, spoke of the "arc of the work" - that is, the ways in which the priorities and values that infuse the work tend to change over time. In the case of the Rural Challenge, she observed:

We began by defining ourselves as a grant-making effort and, for two years, clarifying our vision of what we wanted to fund. Then, finding and supporting partners who could bring this vision to life were consuming concerns. Now our attention is shifting to other priorities: how to promote sharing and learning among these funded partners, how to provoke more public conversation around rural matters, how to influence national and state policies that impact rural schools, how to build a lasting movement.

Like the Rural Challenge, the Chicago and Los Angeles sites also began their work largely identified as grant makers, hoping to fund schools directly and quickly. Within a couple of months of announcing their Annenberg grants, the staffs and boards in these two cities developed requests for proposals (RFPs) to which schools might respond. In turn, they coached schools or school networks through the RFP process, reviewed the proposals thus generated, and established a process for overseeing the grants awarded. Several of the newer Challenge sites - notably Houston, South Florida, and the New York City Arts project - are following a similar path.

In other sites, though, the trajectory has been different. For the San Francisco Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), getting started meant establishing portfolio reviews through which all schools, districts, and support providers seeking membership in the Bay Area's Collaborative would pass. The next steps were defining and organizing the actual work of this collaborative body and, finally, developing a process of identifying and supporting "leadership" schools within the Collaborative.