Annenberg and The Chicago Experience: A Look At K-12 Reform

Much has been made of the connection (or lack of connection) between Barack Obama and William Ayers. What is undisputed is this: from the 1996-97 through 2000-01 school years, the two were part of one of the nation's largest philanthropic efforts to try to change public education.

That effort was spurred by billionaire Walter Annenberg, who launched a five-year, $500 million "Challenge to the Nation" in 1993. Almost 80% of those funds was directed to school reform in some of the country's largest urban school systems, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and greater San Francisco.

Beginning in 1995, Chicago received $49.2 million from the Annenberg Foundation for the project, which was supported by 45 external partners. Did it work -- did the money, and the project, have a measurable impact on student outcomes?

The short answer is "no."

More than 200 Chicago public schools participated; 90 percent were elementary schools that were demographic mirrors of the school system as a whole. When you do the math, it's clear that this wasn't a lot of money per school per year -- the average ranged from a low of $2,553 per school in 2001 to a high of $46,983 per school in 1999. All schools did not participate each year; average enrollment per elementary school was about 700. There were 18 schools that received additional funding the final two years of the project.

From the final technical report on the project (link takes you to summary and two PDFs, emphasis added):

The Challenge's "bottom line" was improving student achievement and other social and psychological outcomes. Our research indicates that student outcomes in Annenberg schools were much like those in demographically similar non-Annenberg schools and across the Chicago school system as a whole, indicating that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes...

There were no statistically significant differences between Annenberg schools and non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain.

Across Annenberg schools, student academic engagement was only slightly greater in 2001 than before the Challenge. Classroom behavior, students' sense of self-efficacy, and social competence were weaker in 2001 than before the Challenge. Like student achievement, there were no statistically significant differences in these outcomes between Annenberg and non-Annenberg schools.

What does this tell us about education reform?
First, reform doesn't take place in a vacuum. In 1988, the Illinois legislature began centralizing the management of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), replacing the superintendent of public schools with a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and five-member Reform Board of Trustees appointed by the mayor. The CEO had authority to intervene in "nonimproving schools."

Concurrent with the Annenberg project, this new CPS CEO placed schools on academic probation based on student performance on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and developed a policy to end "social promotion." Students had to meet minimum scores on the ITBS in 3rd, 6th and 8th grades in order to be promoted. Next, the CPS developed lesson plans and curriculum-specific exams for high school graduation. In other words, the CPS made school "tougher." No data in this report on the impact on drop-out rates.

Second, competing visions of reform -- decentralized versus centralized -- make for poor coordination. The CPS leadership saw the world through centralized glasses. The Annenberg Challenge leadership saw the world through decentralized glasses. As a result, they did not develop a close working relationship, according to the final report on the project.

Because the Challenge operated from a position of decentralization, its goals were broad, rhetorical and non-specific. Instead of creating goals, it created a vision and left it up to the schools to develop goals to meet that vision.

Third, planning matters. The post-Challenge report notes that the failure of the Challenge to achieve an overall effect was a function of (a) shortcomings in design, (b) shortcomings in External Partners ability to promote school development, (c) lack of school commitment and/or ability to engage in the Challenge, and (d) lack of external support. Most of this is planning, although arguably "d" could also be related to resources.

What about resources? The funding sounds somewhat significant on the surface, almost $50 million. But spread over 200+ schools and five years, it's not. The post-Challenge review criticized the Challenge for providing "too few resources and too little support to too many schools and External Partners." A project manager might call this scope creep.

What This Means Today
School reform (K-12) is a hot topic among many voters, and it means different things to different people. It is past time for us to take a collective pause and rethink public education: what is it that we can reasonably expect from a school and what must we expect from parents, family and community?

Under LBJ, we focused on making sure students had full bellies, clearly an important factor for student focus. But schools cannot be expected to compensate for the lack of parental involvement in a child’s learning and development, cannot be expected to overcome all issues related to English-as-a-second-language, cannot be expected to fully counter issues of poverty. If we ("society") want our public schools to do all these things, then perhaps we should experiment with public boarding schools, where the school truly becomes a surrogate parent.

The lesson of Annenberg for 4 November: judge all the candidates (especially on the local level) by their specific proposals, not just their vision.