Annenberg Schools Program Yields Millions, but Gets Mixed Results

The $500-million that the philanthropist Walter Annenberg committed to helping public schools in 1993 produced more than $600-million in matching funds from foundations, businesses, governments, and other sources, says a report released by the Annenberg Foundation this month.

The report, which was designed to summarize the results of the donation and offer lessons to other donors interested in improving public schools, said that the money produced mixed results.

The grant program financed with the $500-million, known as the Annenberg Challenge, expanded professional training opportunities for thousands of teachers and supported the creation of small schools that could provide more personal attention to students. In New York City, for example, it helped create 120 small schools that serve 50,000 of the district’s approximately one million students.

But student achievement did not improve in all the places where grants were made. The report also noted that the grant money was not able to overcome problems caused by shortages of government money, frequent turnover in superintendents and principals, and entrenched district bureaucracies.

“We learned the hard way that if you seek to change the public schools, you must be prepared to deal with repeated setbacks, rapid turnover in leadership, and sudden changes in direction,” said Warren Simmons, executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, at Brown University. But, he said, grant recipients took those lessons to heart and adapted their approaches to fit what they learned. For example, the institute has started a national effort to redesign how big urban districts are organized so they support, rather than impede, school-improvement efforts.

Another concern: Some grant recipients acknowledged in the report that they tried to do too much in too many places. “We spread ourselves too thin,” said Harold Williams, president emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Trust and a board member of the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, which received $53-million. “If we had taken on fewer school[s] and focused our dollars and human resources on those, we would have accomplished more.”

Walter Annenberg had announced his pledge at a White House ceremony, flanked by President Bill Clinton. At that time, Mr. Annenberg pledged $56.5-million to New American Schools, in Arlington, Va.; $6.5-million to the Education Commission of the States, in Denver; and $50-million to create the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

The remaining $387-million was distributed to 18 other projects, including coalitions in 14 cities working on broad school-improvement efforts, a national effort to strengthen rural schools, a national arts-education program, and local arts-education programs in Minneapolis and New York City.

The Annenberg Foundation required that the money it gave away be matched with donations from other sources. In addition, in some cities, the grant money led to increases in government spending on education. In New York, the Center for Arts Education, a nonprofit organization created in 1996 with a $12-million Annenberg grant, was able to prod city leaders to add $75-million to the district’s budget for arts education. That money allowed city schools to hire more than 1,500 art, music, and dance teachers.

Role of Government

In the report, Annenberg Foundation officials noted that even though $500-million is large in the world of philanthropy, it is a small sum compared with large city school budgets, such as New York City, which has an $11.4-billion budget. As a result, it says, these “modest amounts” are insufficient by themselves to transform struggling school systems without “adequate, equitable and reliable funding” from governments.

The report asserts that high-quality teacher training “holds the key to better schools,” and notes that one of the grant program’s successes was increasing the training that teachers receive.

“From the start,” the report says, “it was clear that districts were not devoting enough time and resources to the professional development of teachers.” The Annenberg Challenge sought to change this, and as one example, it points to the Boston school district, which now spends about 4 percent of its total budget, or $5,000 per teacher, on teacher-training efforts. This change represents roughly a fivefold increase, which came about in large part because the Boston Plan for Excellence in Education, a grant recipient, published an analysis criticizing the district’s spending.

In terms of improving how much students learn, the report points to, among others, the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative. Stanford researchers found that the collaborative’s 86 schools gained more ground in improving student achievement than local schools not participating in the project — even in those schools with larger numbers of poor and minority children.

The report did not give a complete overview of any improvements or declines in student achievement at the different sites. However, it did note that there were some mixed results, such as in Philadelphia, which it called “a district where the schools remained in both financial and academic jeopardy.” While it noted that Philadelphia saw some test-score improvements, especially in lower elementary grades, it also pointed out that the district was recently taken over by the state, and it remains “chronically underfunded.”

The report says that at times expectations for what the Annenberg Challenge could accomplish were unrealistic. The Annenberg Foundation and its grantees “should have paid more attention from the start to how we communicated our messages, both to those who worked with the Challenge, and to the wider public and media. We found that the more we talked, the clearer our message became.”

Furthermore, because schools are often isolated, the report suggests that they “need to find ways to open up their doors and enlist more community help in the vital business of educating children.”

It adds: “Educators need to speak clearly about their work. They need to jettison the jargon when speaking to the public. They need to be frank about successes and failures. They need to be open, not closed or secretive. They need to do a better job of explaining what they do and how they do it. In these ways, educators can win the recognition they deserve and be treated like the professionals they are.”

Criticism of Effort

Still, some critics say that overall, the Annenberg Challenge failed to live up to its promises.

“Most people would say that Annenberg didn’t produce the kind of dramatic impacts he was hoping to achieve in the time he was hoping to achieve it,” said Samuel Stringfield, principal investigator at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, at the Johns Hopkins University. “And it’s not because he wasn’t a wonderful man or it wasn’t a wonderful gift.”

Among the problems with the effort, Mr. Stringfield said, was that it opted to support school districts whose budgets were shrinking, such as Philadelphia, which was losing federal money due to declining enrollment. As a result, he said, the Annenberg money tended to plug gaps rather than support new ventures.

But Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Mr. Annenberg’s principal adviser, said he felt some of the criticism the effort received over the years was unjustified.

“When we started this project, we had one challenge: to pick small causes and outdo ourselves, outperform, or do we take big causes, and try to solve them?” he said. “We decided to pick big causes.” While not every project was a success, he said, “much has been accomplished, to my great delight,” pointing to improvements in test scores in several cities that received grants. And he noted that other foundations are continuing to support the work started by the Annenberg Challenge. “If we succeed in 50 percent of what we are doing, it will be a revolution,” he said.

Copies of the report are available free by contacting Natalie Adler at Porter Novelli, 1909 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006, nadler@porternovelli.com; (202) 973-5865. The report also can be downloaded from http://www.annenbergfoundation.org.