This report marks a midpoint in Walter H. Annenberg's $500 million challenge to improve public schools, what he aptly called a citizen's "crusade for the betterment of this country." It comes at a time when evidence from the Annenberg Challenge's first projects has started to accumulate--and to suggest that the program is indeed having a beneficial impact on students, schools, and communities. And it furnishes early lessons that have much to tell about effective school reform.

In preparing this report, the Challenge's national office at Brown University drew upon the findings of the independent research teams that evaluate each project. Like any interim report, this one captures work in progress.

Although Ambassador Annenberg announced his generous gift in December 1993, the Challenge took time to lay the groundwork for its ambitious structure, which called on private citizens and educators to coalesce around their own strategies for school improvement. The Annenberg Foundation also sequenced its grant awards so that the work of the first could inform those that followed.

Even the six "oldest" Challenge projects featured in this report, therefore, stand at different stages of development, as do the local evaluations that chart their progress. But these varied trajectories do not diminish the importance of the findings summarized here.

As the national office takes stock at mid-term, it keeps looking for answers to these pressing questions: Can a financial contribution of whatever magnitude unleash an array of other gifts -- not just of money but of courage and vision and energy -- that make their way to America's schoolchildren and help them learn? Can citizens outside the entrenched systems of public schools help change the way those systems work?

At this halfway point, the Challenge continues to believe they can. When citizens joined by educators bring commitment and fresh ideas to the business of reforming our nation's public schools, it asserts, students will prosper. This report contains early evidence for that conviction.

Barbara Cervone
National Coordinator,
Annenberg Challenge
Associate Director,
Annenberg Institute for School Reform