Jolley Bruce Christman and Amy Rhodes, Consortium for Policy Research in Education and Research for Action
June 2002
We join in mourning the recent death of Ambassador Walter Annenberg, whose belief in public education led him to make extraordinarily generous gifts to organizations and communities that thought they knew how to reform it. Even as he is laid to rest, some of those groups persist in trying to prove that they accomplished more than they did or to rationalize their failure. Nowhere has that endeavor been more dogged than in Annenberg's own Philadelphia, where the effort to evaluate and justify the city's "Children Achieving" program continues unabated at the hands of the Penn-based Consortium for Policy Research in Education and an outfit called Research for Action. This latest report was written by Jolley Bruce Christman and Amy Rhodes, both affiliated with the latter organization. It seeks to appraise the "civic infrastructure" undergirding the city's Annenberg program (which was also former superintendent David Hornbeck's signature reform program) and, as I read it, to lay upon Philadelphia's civic leaders (business, academic, philanthropic, grassroots, etc.) a sizable share of the blame for the demise of Children Achieving and the school system's subsequent takeover by the state. Perhaps most interesting here - reminiscent of Moynihan's "Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding," the seminal analysis of the War on Poverty's community action program - is the authors' exegesis of how various factions within Philadelphia's civic leadership held differing "theories of action" as to the essential nature of the problems facing the school system and the strategies for solving them. In other words, different groups looked at the same school system and saw different ailments and cures, yet each thought it spotted its own within the Children Achieving program. The result was cacophony and fragmentation, no real shared understanding of the nature or mission of the program. Hence, according to these diagnosticians, not a lot of consensus, not a lot of achievement gain, no big infusion of state money and, in the end, the city's cession to the state of control over its school system. An interesting tale, moderately well told and with possible lessons for others involved in comprehensive urban school reform efforts. If only the authors didn't work quite to hard to shift responsibility for what happened away from the architects of the plan itself. FYI, and perhaps self-servingly, among the other evaluations of the Philadelphia Annenberg program - though not mentioned in this report - is a perceptive and critical review a couple of years back by Carol Innerst on behalf of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. You can find it at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=41. You can find the new report at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/children07.pdf.
