ONE YEAR after the Annenberg Challenge money began arriving in some of the country's hardest pressed school districts, the ways teachers, students, and parents behave in schools are slowly shifting into new patterns that look more like trust than despair.

Like a huge ecological change that can only be seen from a distance, the evidence lies in individual stories whose collective shape emerges as the same themes show up in site after site.

In New York City, teachers at three new high schools gather to critique the rigorous graduation standards they are creating for their largely low-income students, who enter speaking little or no English.

In West Philadelphia, volunteers in bright yellow vests patrol high-crime streets with walkie-talkies to show the community's commitment to its schoolchildren.

In Chicago, South Shore neighborhood schools join in arts festivals, sports events, community service projects, and even shared graduation ceremonies to underline the idea that the whole community, not just an isolated school, has a hand in each child's education.

In Los Angeles, teachers pay regular critical visits to each other's classrooms, then meet to "tune up" their professional practice.

In the San Francisco Bay area, one successful school helps a partner improve the "school portfolio" that will admit it to a collaborative network sharing a few central goals.

And in rural Alabama, students publish community newspapers, build and operate greenhouse laboratories, and help revitalize their communities in dozens more ways.

As with a sprawling family whose resemblances leap out to a stranger's eye, these sites share theories, practices, and habits that cut across superficial differences and lend them power and weight.

Far from seeking to stamp a cookie-cutter reform on top of local efforts to improve troubled schools, the Challenge has embraced a wide array of grassroots efforts in nine cities and a number of rural areas.

But all the recipients of Annenberg funds reflect the pragmatic Challenge philosophy: strong links with community organizations; collaborative networks of schools that cross old political barricades, and a belief that race, class, and other inequities must no longer keep a single child from high-quality teaching and learning.

And all share a common thread: the belief that students will meet higher standards only when schools join forces with each other and their local communities. In the first handful of urban Annenberg initiatives encompassing roughly a thousand schools, that belief plays out in ways that reflect each site's idiosyncratic culture and political context.

AN OLDER GENTLEMAN WEARING A yellow and blue vest with the Safe Corridors symbol on it makes a brightly visible landmark for West Philadelphia schoolchildren walking to school every morning through a high-crime area. Not only does Raymond Warwick greet the students of this neighborhood by name and inquire about their progress in school; he also organizes some dozen other adult volunteers to provide safe passage for students through dangerous thoroughfares and corners. Businesses, churches, and even individual houses on every block also display the Safe Corridors logo, offering a haven in troubling situations.

Like a fictional character fending off obstacles right and left to win the prize, Philadelphia's school reformers are struggling in a drama whose impossible odds would appear overdrawn on any stage.

The city hired Superintendent David Hornbeck explicitly to put into place the "Children Achieving" plan that forms the basis of the Annenberg Challenge grant. But a series of blows--a 1995 freeze on state aid to basic education; slashing cuts in the city's school budget; uncommonly specific court involvement in the details of the plan; opposition in the tabloid press and by the teachers union--might easily have crippled or killed it in its infancy.

Still, the business community has rallied behind Children Achieving, coming up with $92 million in matching grants in its first year.

And the first 67 schools to restructure into six neighborhood "clusters" to organize their reform efforts within a smaller, more supportive structure speak highly of the ways in which the new system is working for them.

Annenberg funds matched by a gift from Philadelphia's Mercy Health Systems made the Safe Corridors program possible. But it depends as well on a growing sense that this neighborhood's ordinary citizens are connected to its own schools. Children Achieving calls for a Family Resource Network staff in every cluster, which works to forge such community links, often behind the scenes.

Hornbeck's plan stands out for its insistence on proceeding on all fronts at once: raising standards and incentives; decentralizing and coordinating the bureaucracy so that schools have more control; nurturing leadership and professional development among teachers and principals; breaking big schools into small learning communities; and drawing the public into meaningful involvement in schools.

And though it lacks the statutory authority of state legislation--which characterizes the comparable school reform agenda in Kentucky that Hornbeck helped create--Philadelphia's sweeping plan embraces every school in the district, not just those eager for change.

Despite a desperate financial situation, the entire school district has now reorganized into 22 clusters of roughly eleven schools each. Rather than dealing with the cumbersome "downtown" central office, these small neighborhood networks are making plans across schools and grade levels--with an emphasis on improving teaching and learning in manageable groups of students and teachers, on providing family resources, and on including parents in governance.

A small cluster staff facilitates and provides resources as schools in the cluster break up into the "small learning communities" at the heart of Philadelphia's plan, develop a shared vision, and adopt new teaching strategies. Some clusters foster a common vision and strategies across schools; others ask each school or small learning community to take the initiative.

The West Philadelphia cluster of thirteen schools, for instance, put its primary professional development emphasis on team-building, creating small learning communities within larger schools, encouraging interdisciplinary teaching and cooperative learning, and using alternative assessments. "Every school aims to help our children learn better, but they take whatever path they see fit," says cluster leader Janice Butler.

To chart connections among their curricula and teaching practice, staff from the cluster's two "feeder patterns" of elementary and middle schools meet twice yearly with each other and colleagues from the cluster's one high school.

"We share what has worked, and develop support systems for students as they move from school to school," says Butler.

As one of the first six, this cluster received $18 extra per pupil from the Children Achieving Challenge last year to help with these efforts. (The next sixteen clusters will get only half this amount, due to the fiscal crisis.) The William Penn Foundation, for example, funds three extra instructional hours a week for at-risk students and three hours of after-school community-based activities, and contributes toward professional development, books, and computers. But like all the clusters, West Philadelphia also relies heavily on outside grants. "We apply for every cent we can," Butler says.