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Preface Early Lessons from the Challenge How the Challenge Is Helping Schools How the Challenge Is Influencing
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As the first Challenge projects reach middle age, several challenges within the Challenge come into starker focus. First, it must continue to discern the actual impact of each project on students. The Challenge wishes not simply to introduce new structures, or opportunities for professional development, or community involvement in schooling, but through such means to benefit students.
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Citizens can help change entrenched public school systems in fundamental ways. |
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It must always close that vital loop, reaching beyond program implementation to assess what those programs mean in the lives of young people.
Challenge projects must also use their status as intermediary change agents to further influence educational policies and to spread best practices. As well, the Challenge must ensure that the experience gained and analyzed along the way in the first projects informs the development of newer Challenge projects. Finally, the Challenge must prepare for its own metamorphosis, developing strategies for continuing the work once Annenberg funding ends. The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, for example, has created a "2001" committee to plan for this transition. The Rural Challenge has already designed a successor organization, called the Rural School and Community Trust. In Chicago, the Challenge has launched the Chicago Public Education Fund, intended to provide long-term funding for school reform and to cement the partnership between school district, business, and civic leaders. As they face these tasks, Challenge projects must stay ever alert. Their thinking and actions must incorporate the persistent challenges and provocative lessons emerging from this remarkable effort to make a positive difference for those too often neglected. As a public-private coalition pursuing fundamental educational change, each Challenge project must keep in mind the following: |
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To sustain local support, it must remain attentive to local priorities and contexts, work to inspire new vision, and educate new constituencies.
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To succeed in improving student learning, it must use its special position as a boundary-crossing "intermediary organization" to work "up the system" and "down the system" at once.
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To influence educational policies and structures it must forge strong relationships with the very bureaucracies it seeks to change: districts, states, teachers unions, and teacher education programs.
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To touch the lives of students, it must reach into schools and classrooms, spreading best practices and influencing the professional development of teachers without creating impossible demands on time and budgets.
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It must advocate for high standards, yet help the parties closest to the students play a key role in judging the effectiveness of the schools.
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In a context of widening social and economic gaps between rich and poor, it must strengthen mutual ties between schools and the community, including parents, and build the political will to educate all students.
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It must reach enough schools to make an impact on the larger system, yet root reforms deeply enough to make a significant difference in every school.
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It must aim for whole-school change, yet also help schools focus and sequence their change efforts, tackling only a few things at once.
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It cannot assume the readiness of schools and partner organizations to take advantage of opportunities for fundamental change. The players involved need substantial time and support to reach that readiness point.
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It must objectively analyze what constitutes reasonable success given the time and resources provided.
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It must work for new, more flexible systems that accommodate the priorities of all citizens, not just those the educational bureaucracy currently serves best.
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Can citizens outside the entrenched systems of public schools help change the way those systems work in fundamental ways? The Challenge continues to believe that they can-and as the Challenge projects go forward, they test that belief.
At their best, the projects adjust, change, take risks, mature. They build on action, then thoughtful reflection, then more action and more reflection; the effects of any one experience or intervention can take years to show up. Nonetheless, five years into the life of the Challenge, its first six projects are starting to show important signs that this ambitious and idealistic effort is indeed reaching schoolchildren. The cross-site research community of the Annenberg Challenge will continue to chart this impact closely in the years ahead. What legacy, in the end, do we hope the Challenge will leave? In addition to better schools and robust partnerships for change, we hope it will include an enduring faith that, as citizens, we can do better for all students by responding with creativity and tenacity to their diverse needs. |
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What Lies Ahead
