Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
March 2003
I suppose we will forever see fresh efforts to evaluate and learn from--and spin--the effects of the "Annenberg Challenge," the multifaceted efforts undertaken after 1993 to reform public education with the help of Ambassador Walter Annenberg's munificent half-billion dollar gift. The latest such effort is this 130-page collection of seven studies, compiled and published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. (Given its source, you can safely assume it isn't going to be super-critical!) This is a topic we have addressed before, both in the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's own three-city appraisal [http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=41] and in reporting on prior efforts by the Annenberg folks to reflect on their experiences. [for Gadfly's coverage, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/issues/index.cfm?topic=22.] The central difficulty in evaluating the Annenberg Challenge is that it took so many different forms. Just about all they had in common was their insistence on changing the public-school system itself (rather than, say, competing with it or creating alternatives to it) and their reliance on "intermediary organizations" for this purpose. This means the specific strategies employed in one city differed greatly from those in the next city, making it impossible to generalize. This volume seeks to adduce lessons from half a dozen sites (Boston, New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami) plus an arts-based strategy. Think of it as a collection of case studies by sympathetic but often perceptive participant/observers. It's the sort of collection that leaves the overview piece (by Brenda Turnbull of Policy Studies Associates) using phrases like "neither created nor validated simple recipes for reform" and "experiences are rich in lessons." In other words, it's classic "qualitative" education research, often interesting but ultimately inconclusive. That's not a bad summary of the Annenberg Challenge itself. You can find it at http://www.annenbergchallenge.org/pubs/index.html#chapters.
