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Preface
Early Lessons from the Challenge How the Challenge Is Helping Schools How the Challenge Is Influencing |
AMBASSADOR ANNENBERG'S $500 million gift to the nation's public schools, launched at the White House in December 1993, set out an unprecedented challenge to an American public increasingly vocal about the need for school improvement. His gift combined his idealistic belief in America's democratic obligation to educate all our children well with a practical plan that would galvanize communities, in their own best interests, to take the necessary tough political steps to do so.
Five years later, the last of the Annenberg funds have been allocated. The first grant, to support small schools in New York City, was awarded in the fall of 1994. The last, to spur arts education as a lever for school improvement in Minneapolis, was announced in the summer of 1997. Just as the Annenberg Foundation has staggered the awards of its Challenge grants, so, too, has each project staggered its grants to schools. Thus, while some schools have been working with Challenge funds for three years, others have just begun. Today, 18 locally designed Annenberg Challenge projects are under way, involving partnerships with almost 400 school districts in nearly forty states. Nine of these, involving pledges of anywhere from ten to fifty million Annenberg dollars, focus on some of the nation's largest urban school districts. One spans all of rural America. Three focus on the arts. Five grants, ranging in size from $1 to $4 million, support innovative efforts in smaller urban districts. Overall in the Annenberg Challenge, approximately 2,300 schools have been funded, with the potential in 1999 alone to affect nearly 1.5 million children. More than $487 million in matching local funds had been raised by the end of 1998, and more than a thousand local partners-including businesses, independent reform groups, and not-for-profit agencies-are currently engaged in the implementation of the Challenge reforms. The Challenge's broad impact is beginning to emerge in all of its projects, but especially its first six: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area, and a national consortium of rural sites. And at this midpoint in the work of these first projects, important lessons are also emerging from the particular design of the Challenge initiative-lessons that shed new light on what works and what doesn't in large-scale systemic school reform. A Better Option for School Change These findings offer a compelling alternative to the two currently popular theories of reforming public education through either centralized controls or privatization. The Challenge rests on a different set of values. Local citizens and communities must join as partners in improving their schools, it asserts, and public-private coalitions can provide the tool to achieve progress. This design has lent the Challenge two distinctive features. |
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First, the Challenge embraces pluralism-multiple strategies for bringing good schools to life and expanding their numbers. These diverse strategies emerged from local conversation and circumstances, local priorities and leadership, as the Annenberg Foundation invited each project to develop its own plan for reform.
The New York Networks plan, for example, bears its uniquely "New York" stamp, the result of its extensive experience with small alternative schools; whereas the Philadelphia plan is unique in its extraordinary effort to redesign the big-city school system. Yet the Challenge also advances a singular vision of good schools: schools with high standards, where all children are known well; schools with a clear vision of where they are headed and how to get there; schools with a professional climate of teacher collegiality and reflection; schools that include parents and the community as collaborators. |
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Second, the Challenge relies on intermediary organizations as agents of change-an important strategy that has heretofore attracted little scholarly attention or analysis. School reform does not happen on its own; it requires facilitation, and Challenge projects have stepped forward to play this role.
As independent public-private partnerships neither of the system nor wholly outside it, they cross organizational boundaries to intervene at critical points both up and down the educational system. They galvanize new resources from public and private sources. They educate, advocate, develop programs, and coach people in managing change. And they bring to school improvement the private creativity and civic mobilization that policy-driven reform alone cannot provide. |
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Against the Odds, Making a Difference
As promising as this "intermediary organization" strategy appears to be, it is also difficult. Coalitions take time to coalesce. Working up and down the educational system, from state house to schoolhouse, is a formidable task. Acting as an educator, advocate, program developer, monitor, and coach-as well as galvanizing new resources for change-makes for a very full plate. Finding common ground between insiders and outsiders in our nation's biggest urban school districts inherently invites tension. Nonetheless, the evidence at mid-point indicates that the Annenberg Challenge is making a difference in schools and communities. |
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However complicated to build and sustain, the collaboration it asks of local actors has focused attention on critical issues, brought forward diverse voices, and seeded new alliances supportive of reform.
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Its call for local design and flexible implementation has yielded an unusual level of energy among citizens and school people alike. | |
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It is leaving small yet encouraging footprints in the larger educational system. | |
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Most of all, its focus on changing schools has set in motion promising strategies for improving student learning. | |
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The Challenge eschews magic bullets; instead it supports local citizens in coming together to change their schools. This approach, we believe, offers a compelling alternative to centralized controls or privatization for those who would improve our public education systems. In the pages that follow, we examine further what we are learning from the Challenge's overall design, then summarize some of the ways the first Challenge projects are benefiting schools, students, and the system alike.
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Introduction
