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Preface
How the Challenge Is Helping Schools How the Challenge Is Influencing |
AN INITIATIVE AS LARGE and complex as the Annenberg Challenge teems with lessons about improving public education. Many of these are familiar: translating standards into changed classroom practice requires abundant time and support for teachers; leadership is crucial; the institutional constraints on developing teachers' capacity to teach well are profound; too few children enter our nation's urban schools ready to learn. Yet several new lessons have also emerged from the independent evaluations that are closely following each of the first six Challenge projects: I. Local context and design are crucial to a reform effort's success. Many school reform efforts emphasize implementing a program adopted from another site or a national "vendor," or generated by a granting organization. The Challenge, instead, required that those wishing to receive Annenberg funds convene local planning coalitions to lay the groundwork for the reform efforts to follow. These coalitions had to name the problem they wished to tackle; plan solutions; and gain local support from a large array of participants, including funders, civic leaders, school leaders, reformers, universities, and elected officials. Each of the first six Challenge projects created a design for change that emerged from its particular local context, and that had its own starting point: |
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New York City's Challenge aimed to create a critical mass of good small schools, networked to each other, with substantial autonomy, legitimacy, standing, and influence in the larger system.
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The transient Los Angeles population had created an unstable learning environment for students, and the Los Angeles Unified School District's own reform initiative was struggling to extend its reach when the Los Angeles Challenge came up with its plan for neighborhood "School Families" that would institute coherent K-12 reforms.
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Chicago's Challenge sought to build on the city's 1988 reform movement giving local schools more autonomy, but to extend it through community partnerships that would help schools make the fundamental changes necessary to improve teaching and learning.
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With a new and reform-minded superintendent, Philadelphia's Challenge launched a sweeping whole-district plan aimed at raising standards and attracting state support and funding for the ailing city schools.
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So many different school reform efforts competed in the San Francisco Bay Area that its Challenge initiative aimed to bring more coherence to the region's initiatives, helping them collaborate, focus their efforts, and engage in sustained inquiry and action concerning the results.
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As rural schools and communities struggled for their survival, the Rural Challenge aimed to revitalize both, by nurturing a mutual effort among schools and their communities to strengthen education by creating new connections with local cultures, environments, histories, and economies.
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Each Challenge project is "tailor-made" by and for its particular community, and this local context and design have proved a powerful stimulus to collaboration, innovation, and action. |
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This emphasis on local context and design invites a keen appreciation of the volatility and dissension that mark so many urban school districts today. Five years ago, when Annenberg announced his challenge, few foresaw the political charge that American public education would soon take on, with vastly different theories for improving public schools competing for primacy and often colliding.
Despite this turbulence, the Challenge's encouragement of local design and ownership of school reform has proven a powerful stimulus to collaboration, innovation, and action. For example: |
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New York City's Challenge (the New York Networks for School Renewal) began in 1995 with 80 small schools. It has since added 60 new schools and, with some 50,000 students attending its 140 small schools, is now bigger than most of the nation's school districts. Concurrently, the city's school chancellor has embraced small schools as a key part of his strategy for improving public education, and has established a special office to oversee their creation. When he recently selected six city schools for a new charter school program, he chose five from the New York Networks project, citing their "proven instructional and managerial track record and a history of entrepreneurial success."
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In Philadelphia, the Children Achieving Challenge has mobilized reform efforts on various fronts at once. For the first time, all eligible children now attend full-day kindergarten. Textbook shortages that once plagued the district have been virtually eliminated. Parent participation and volunteerism have increased. Children and families have better access to social services. Student and staff attendance have improved significantly. Teachers are receiving increased opportunities for professional development. The district now directs a greater share of its resources to instruction. Implementing the recommendations of a private sector task force saved the district $29 million during 1996 and 1997. And test scores show improved student performance in reading, mathematics, and science for two consecutive years.
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The Rural Challenge has brought together 32 rural sites--from Alaska to Alabama, Maine to Texas--that ask students, teachers, and local citizens to create a "curriculum of place." Students draw upon their surroundings as sources of learning and learn by doing, in the process making real contributions to their communities. In Parish, Alabama, for example, students discovered high concentrations of lead in the school water supply, then found similar levels in municipal water. As a result of their two-year investigation, the town installed a new water system. Students in Minnesota discovered deformed frogs in their back yards and joined an international Internet group testing various hypotheses for this world-wide phenomena. In Oregon, students are restocking rivers with salmon raised in their own hatcheries.
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Each of these examples has a "tailor-made" quality that derives from the perceived needs of its particular community, and which depends on local coalitions for its design and implementation. The Challenge believes this local context and design have been critical to their success.
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Early Lessons from the Challenge
