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Preface Early Lessons from the Challenge How the Challenge Is Helping Schools
How the Challenge Is Influencing |
Annenberg funds, unarguably, are aimed at schoolchildren most in need. The majority of the nearly 1.5 million children attending schools supported through the Annenberg Challenge are poor and minority:
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In Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, 80 percent receive free or reduced lunch. Close to 80 percent of the Rural Challenge's funds are invested in communities where poverty is the norm.
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Ninety percent of the students in New York and Chicago Challenge schools are children of color, 80 percent in Philadelphia, 76 percent in Los Angeles, 60 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area, and roughly half in the Rural Challenge.
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Many are newcomers from immigrant families. Approximately one-quarter of the children in Challenge-supported schools in Los Angeles and one-fifth in the Bay Area speak limited English.
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For many of these students, attending school has gone hand in hand with academic failure. Three-quarters of Los Angeles Challenge grants, for example, went to schools where less than half of the students scored at or above the national average on the Stanford Achievement Test. In Detroit, a more recent Annenberg Challenge project, one out of every four students drops out each year, and only three out of ten ninth-grade students graduate.
Challenge funds cannot reverse the pervasive inequalities in this country's social and economic situation, but they aim to drive a wedge into the educational system that can open opportunities for poor children not only to learn but to thrive. The first six Challenge projects are at different stages with regard to collecting data that show how students are benefiting, but promising signs include the following: |
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Some 50,000 New York City students (10 percent) now attend one of 140 small public schools sponsored or created with Challenge assistance. These students are both more of color and poorer than students in the rest of the city's schools, with comparable prior academic performance. The first research report on student achievement for New York Networks' small schools has found that the proportion of NYNSR students in grades three through eight who read at or above the national norms increased from 36 to 41 percent in a single year (spring '96 - spring '97). Unlike most research, the analysis compared the progress of the same NYNSR students from one year to the next, using student-level data provided by the Board of Education rather than school-level data. In high school, New York Networks schools show the city's lowest dropout rates, making them the most productive of all the city's schools in terms of cost per graduate. At eleven high schools, 81 percent of the first graduating classes were accepted into college, a rate well above that of high school students in the rest of the city or state. | |
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Rural Challenge students now spend 10 to 20 percent of their time on projects connecting student learning to real work in the community. The quality of student work and the level of student engagement continue to strengthen, a Harvard University-based team of researchers observed in their most recent evaluation report. Many students in Rural Challenge schools, the researchers noted, study history by becoming historians of their local towns. They study science by analyzing their watersheds, or raising fish for commercial use, or mapping and documenting the trees, birds, and mammals in their regions. They learn grammar and syntax by producing widely read community newspapers. In addition, students face real-life accountability by sharing their work at school board meetings, legislative hearings, community meetings, and state conventions. | |
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Under Philadelphia's Children Achieving Challenge, all eligible children in the district now attend full-day kindergarten for the first time. Student attendance has improved district-wide. Students and their families have better access to social services through the schools; the district's Family Resource Network has helped more than 2,500 students obtain health insurance and primary care physicians. Finally, test scores have shown improved student performance in reading, mathematics, and science for two consecutive years, 1997 and 1998. In grades four and eight, the number of students scoring at or above basic level in reading, math, and science has increased at least 10 points from 1996 to 1998. Gains for eleventh graders ranged from 3.4 points in science to 8.2 points in reading. | |
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In Chicago, teachers from three elementary schools in the Whirlwind Artslab network are using curricula and techniques drawn from the arts to improve reading skills. A controlled research study found that the Basic Reading through Dance curriculum, developed by Whirlwind, improved students' skills up to 79 percent more than their peers' in several key reading areas. Another Whirlwind curriculum, which links reading comprehension to drama, boosted scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills by 33 percent more than those of a control group. At another Chicago school, a school-wide focus on literacy--including a revamped curriculum, a daily hour-and-a-half block for reading/language arts, professional development for teachers, including training in the Junior Great Books program--is yielding dramatic results. The percentage of students at the Amelia Earhart Elementary School scoring at or above the national average on reading tests improved from 28 percent in 1991 to 80 percent in 1998, with similar gains in math of 38.9 to 85 percent.
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Within the Los Angeles Unified School District, elementary schools in 13 of the 14 LAAMP School Families showed improved performance on standardized tests. Seven of the 12 middle schools and 40 percent of the participating senior high schools showed improved student performance as well. LAAMP School Families, researchers from UCLA and USC report, are giving the county's highly mobile student population a better chance of encountering consistent policies for curricula, instruction, assessment, and discipline as they move to a new school.
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With BASRC's help in San Francisco, John Muir Elementary School brought the district's second-to-worst reading scores up by 16 points over four years, and all signs point to continuing progress. The school received funds for an improved library, books, computers, and a parent educator, among other things. To combat nation-wide trends that show Latino students lagging behind other groups, Tennyson High School, another BASRC Leadership school in Hayward, is in its fourth year of several aggressive programs aimed at preparing Latino students for college. Three years ago, only 65 of the school's 1,600 students took the PSAT exams; this year, 265 took this warm-up to the SATs. In addition, sophomore students in the program who took an English-proficiency exam commonly given to freshmen in the California State University system achieved an average score equal to that of the first-year college students. Tennyson predicts that almost 80 percent of the 300 students in the program will be college-ready by June 1999.
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How Students Are Benefiting
