Critique of Annenberg School Plan Was Hasty, Misinformed

To the Editor:

Patrick J. Reilly’s flawed exposition (“Why Annenberg’s School Plan Failed,” My View, April 9) bears little relationship to the facts.

Mr. Reilly states that the Annenberg Challenge is nearing its end. In fact, the first of the 18 matching grants awarded through the challenge is just now reaching its midpoint. The majority have been in operation for only one or two years.

Mr. Reilly states that substantive signs of improvement in student performance have yet to materialize. Although schools participating in the earliest of the challenge grants are only in their first or second year of work, preliminary results regarding the impact on students are encouraging. While it’s imperative to point out that test scores are but one measure of student learning, some examples follow:

* Chicago Comer schools, members of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, are achieving more than a single year’s progress toward their Illinois Goal Assessment Program test score during one school year — a rate faster than the city standard.

* The Pasadena School Family, participants in the Los Angeles Challenge project, boasts an increase in the number of students taking pre-algebra in the eighth grade and a decrease in the number of limited-English-proficient students who drop out of high school.

* Eighty-two per cent of Philadelphia’s schools improved over last year’s base line, with 71 of these 208 schools meeting their two-year performance targets in one year.

* At 11 New York Annenberg schools, 81 per cent 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. Another New York Challenge school, Harlem’s Frederick Douglass Academy, posted the highest reading and math scores in its district and the third-highest SAT scores among New York City Schools; 95 per cent of its first graduating class were headed to prestigious, four-year colleges.

* Two Annenberg Challenge schools — one in Chicago and one in New York — were among five schools nationwide honored by the U.S. Department of Education as New Urban High Schools.

Mr. Reilly suggests that Ambassador Annenberg believes that money is the answer. On the contrary, Mr. Annenberg is keenly aware that his gift of $500-million over five years is minuscule compared to the $300-billion spent annually on K-12 education. Indeed, the Annenberg Challenge was envisaged as a catalyst for change, a metaphor for progress through cooperation. Its overarching goal has been to build non- partisan, public-private coalitions for enduring educational change instead of isolated attempts at reform.

Mr. Reilly states that the challenge “simply increases the money flow to a system that diverts grants to serve the interests of politics and bureaucracy.” In fact, none of the challenge grants has been awarded to local school authorities. Instead, all have been made to independent, non-profit entities. A newly constituted governing board of volunteers, drawn largely from the private sector, oversees the implementation of each grant and decides how local challenge funds are allocated.

Furthermore, the challenge stipulates that no more than 10 per cent of Annenberg funds can be spent on administration. At least 90 per cent of challenge monies must go directly to schools and to the non-profit and private partners working with these schools.

Mr. Reilly cites several problems that result from trying to work with public-school systems. Although difficulties admittedly exist, the collaborative efforts that define the challenge are beginning to pay dividends in terms of changing the larger educational system of which all schools are part. For example:

* New York City Schools’ Chancellor Rudolph Crew recently created a new position within his leadership team (director of support for new and developing schools) that suggests his increased support — despite Mr. Reilly’s assertions to the contrary — for the new, small schools at the heart of the New York Challenge project.

* In Boston, Superintendent Tom Payzant recommended that the School Committee adopt citywide a one-page plan for whole-school change prepared by the partners in the Annenberg work in Boston.

* In the Bay Area, several school districts, including Oakland and San Francisco, have adopted as a districtwide accountability tool a system of school portfolios modeled on that of the Bay Area Challenge project.

Mr. Reilly states that the promised evaluations have gone undone. In fact, regular, comprehensive evaluation is an integral part of each challenge project. An interim and final report on the challenge’s overall impact will be published in December 1998 and December 2001, respectively. The challenge just released its third annual report of progress several weeks ago and publishes Challenge Journal three times a year, as well as a newsletter — all of which are available at no charge to anyone.

Improving public schools is slow and painstaking work. There are, unfortunately, no magic bullets, despite the urgency of the task. There is no simple panacea. But we are gratified by the level of cooperation and progress that we have seen in such a short time. The Annenberg Challenge has united parents and teachers from central Los Angeles to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota with corporate leaders like David Kearns, former head of Xerox, and Lou Gerstner, current head of IBM, around a single belief: that our nation’s public institutions can and must be places of quality, and that quality is not and cannot be the sole domain of private institutions.

Mr. Reilly’s article does a disservice to Ambassador Annenberg and the scores of community, political, corporate, foundation, and education leaders working together to strengthen our system of public education. Those who have faith in our democracy deserve better. Unwarranted attacks by professional cynics cannot, and will not, diminish Mr. Annenberg’s faith in our democracy and in our youth. Nor will it slacken our effort to bring about true reform to our public-education systems.

Vartan Gregorian
President Emeritus
Brown University
President
Carnegie Corporation of New York
New York

Ramon Cortines
Interim Director
Barbara Cervone National Coordinator for the Annenberg Challenge
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Brown University

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To the Editor:

Patrick Reilly is misinformed, hasty, and incorrect in deeming the Annenberg Challenge a failure. At the Center for Arts Education: the New York City Annenberg Challenge for Arts Education, our first 18 months of operation have been nothing less than a resounding success.

Our program, designed to improve schools in New York City through arts education, is using the Annenberg Foundation’s $12-million challenge grant, and the $24-million in public and private contributions it is leveraging, to fund directly individual schools and the private, non-profit arts and cultural organizations with which those schools form partnerships. Although the center is collaborating with the New York City Board of Education, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the United Federation of Teachers to promote systemic change, each of the arts-education partnerships the center supports is conceived and developed at the school level, not by a school district or the Board of Education itself.

Initial evaluation by an external agency has already shown that, even in their pilot phase, our arts-education partnerships have been effective in providing many low-performing students with a means of excelling in the classroom and in getting previously uninvolved parents interested in their children’s schools — an urban phenomenon we are sure even Mr. Reilly would support. Discussions with teachers and school administrators lead us to believe that as our programs move into their second year of implementation, evaluation will reveal that they are positively affecting student achievement.

Presently, through our arts-education partnerships, 61 of the city’s schools are working together with over 100 of the nation’s finest arts institutions to achieve school improvement by infusing arts education into the schools’ curricula and structures. Recent research conducted by universities across the country has revealed the important role arts education can play in the intellectual development and academic success of students and in school reform. These findings assure us that our programs will have a significant positive impact on the 60,000 New York City students and the nearly 100 schools they will serve over the next four years and that they will begin the restoration of arts education throughout the city’s school system.

Laurie Tisch Sussman
Chairman

Hollis Headrick
Executive Director
The Center for Arts Education
New York

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To the Editor:

I adamantly disagree with both the spirit and the letter of Patrick Reilly’s pronouncements on the Annenberg Challenge. To imply, as Mr. Reilly does, that Walter Annenberg unloaded $500-million on our schools and expected them to change overnight based on the money alone is downright inaccurate.

The Annenberg Challenge awards gone toward funding proven, research-based programs which deploy their knowledge and expertise into the districts, toward schools and districts grossly undercapitalized, and perhaps more significantly, the grants have served as a catalyst for change, sending a very strong message about the need for improvement.

Mr. Reilly lauds competition as the answer to our schools’ trouble. While I agree that competition is an effective way to compel schools to clean up their acts, competition alone is not the answer. Research, teacher training, alternative approaches to instructing, high standards and expectations, and many other methods also need to be a part of the equation.

The legacy to be left by Walter Annenberg is that of vision, compassion, and urgency. Walter Annenberg recognized very early — back when education was a backwater issue and not in vogue — that educating our youngsters is a national imperative. So instead of merely finger pointing and naysaying, we all have to be constructive and capitalize on the momentum we are now enjoying.

The education-reform movement has the nation’s attention, more now than ever. And for that we owe a debt of gratitude to Walter Annenberg.

David T. Kearns
Former Chairman and Chief Executive
Xerox Corporation
Stamford, Conn.
Former Deputy Secretary
U.S. Department of Education

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To the Editor:

As executive director of the organization created to oversee the San Francisco Bay area’s Hewlett-Annenberg Challenge, a joint effort of the Walter Annenberg and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations, I can say with confidence that Patrick Reilly has his facts wrong about both the Annenberg Challenge and about what schools need.

On the subject of the challenge, Mr. Reilly states that funds are lining the pockets of bureaucrats, that evaluation reports on the challenge have never been completed, and that results have not been achieved. In reality, Annenberg Challenge funds always go to non-profit organizations that, in turn, give grants to schools. No bureaucrats are lining their pockets.

In the San Francisco Bay area, the challenge grant has been received by the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, a non-profit organization governed by a volunteer board. We provide grants to schools; funds are spent on professional development and on release time for teachers to plan and learn together — the kind of expenditures which, according to research, make a difference in student learning. The challenge requires its grantees to limit administrative overhead to 10 per cent. B.A.S.R.C.’s overhead is 7 per cent, far less than virtually any of the private-sector corporations the public sector is advised to emulate.

Mr. Reilly also states that evaluation reports have not been completed. In fact, the challenge continues to be rigorously evaluated. Each site has completed reports on schedule and has widely disseminated them. Even at this early stage, results are promising. (The majority of challenge sites are under two years old — despite the fact that Reilly describes the challenge as entering its fifth and final year.)

Mr. Reilly also states that results have not been realized from the challenge. But formal, data-based evaluations show that teachers and students in challenge schools have indeed overcome formidable obstacles of poverty and racial and language difficulties to accomplish encouraging successes. Stunning graduation and college-admission rates have been posted by small schools among the 140 challenge sites in New York City. In Chicago and Philadelphia, test scores are rising. And here in the Bay Area, B.A.S.R.C. is working with almost 300 schools. All of them continually assess their reform plans on the basis of student achievement, and many are already showing gains in reading scores, graduation rates, and other measures of student success.

So is money from foundations, taxpayers, or wherever the panacea for schools? Of course not. Is the Hewlett-Annenberg Challenge, which provided $50-million over a five-year period to support school reform in a six-county region of the San Francisco Bay area, enough to improve all the schools? Of course not. The region we serve includes over 1,200 schools. That makes public education a $4-billion-a-year industry; no one imagines that it can be transformed with $10-million annually.

Yet money does matter. Californians who are critical of schools too often overlook the fact that the state’s per-pupil spending has fallen from near the top in the 1960s, when the state was widely seen as having the best schools in the nation, to a shameful 41st today.

Investments from foundations matter, too. While only the taxpayers of California can decide to fund schools at a level that will make world-class standards a realistic expectation, foundations can often fund approaches and opportunities that our schools and children need but which — due to budget shortages — hard-working teachers, parents, and principals now view as luxuries.

Though no foundation can provide these resources for an entire region, they can help a few pioneering schools demonstrate the effectiveness of new approaches. Far from being critical of successful and generous entrepreneurs like Hewlett and Annenberg, we should thank them, and we should hope that the next generation of successful corporate leaders will be equally visionary.

Merrill Vargo
Executive Director
Bay Area School Reform Collaborative
San Francisco

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To the Editor:

Among the erroneous information contained in Patrick J. Reilly’s opinion piece indicting Walter Annenberg for his generous gift to public education, two misguided assertions were particularly troubling.

Mr. Reilly states that the Annenberg Challenge “simply increases the money flow to a system that diverts grants to serve the interests of politics and bureaucracy.” This implies that challenge grants in my city are given to the Chicago Public Schools central administration.

In fact, our grants are distributed directly to individual schools working in collaboration with a growing number of Chicago-area organizations. For example, our grants have supported school partnerships with museum programs, arts-integration and literacy organizations, and programs that explore the best use of technology in the classroom. Mr. Reilly would do well to employ the same rigor in his fact finding that he accuses the challenge of lacking in its grant administration.

Far more disturbing, however, is Mr. Reilly’s ill-conceived conclusion that philanthropists should content themselves with saving a handful of lucky children who might be able to attend private school for a year or two with the help of more-modest private donations. What should we do with the rest of the nation’s children? Mr. Reilly might suggest that we let them eat cake.

Every child in this country deserves a quality education. As Walter Annenberg so clearly understands, a majority of our nation’s children rely on — and will continue to rely on — public schools to meet their educational needs. It is our responsibility as members of this society to insure that the schools they attend offer them the bright futures they deserve.

Ken Rolling
Executive Director
Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Chicago