Reform Efforts Won’t Solve Education Crisis

To the Editor:

Although I am not surprised that the leaders of Walter Annenberg’s $500-million school-reform program rallied to its defense (“Critique of Annenberg School Plan Was Hasty, Misinformed,” Letters, May 7), I am surprised at the extent to which they distort the truth to suggest that I have done the same in my opinion piece, “Why Annenberg’s School Plan Failed” (My View, April 9).

When Mr. Annenberg initially announced his $500-million “challenge” grant program in December 1993, he defined it as a five-year program. Yet the program’s leaders — Vartan Gregorian, Ramon Cortines, and Barbara Cervone — argue that most of the Annenberg-funded reform efforts have been in operation only one or two years. That is true. But it does not change the fact that the five-year grant program is due to end this year, while the projects may continue indefinitely.

If individual projects are just getting started due to political disagreements, legal complications, bureaucratic inefficiencies, mismanagement, and other problems, then my argument is strengthened: Such problems are endemic to the public-school system (especially in inner cities), and even a half-billion-dollar reform effort can have only limited impact without an end to the system’s near-monopoly position in the education market.

The Annenberg Challenge’s leaders and others question my claim that the challenge has not issued promised evaluations of its progress. Two pledges were made at the beginning of the challenge: to provide “annual accountings” from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and to “contract with an independent agency to provide two in-depth studies of the Challenge” after three years and after five years. In phone calls to both the institute and the Annenberg Foundation, I was told that these reports do not exist, and the foundation offers no annual report — a shocking lack of accountability for such a well-endowed fund.

The challenge’s leaders now claim that progress reports and a newsletter are available to the public; these were not offered to me, and they do not satisfy the initial promises of the foundation. Studies of some funded projects do exist, and I used them to draw my conclusions that the challenge has failed to bring substantial reform.

While there are other disagreements, I will tackle one additional point: The challenge’s defenders, with the exception of David Kearns, dismiss my call for competition with private schools as politically motivated and insensitive to the needs of public schools. Instead, with ever-expanding academic and social programs, facilities, personnel, and now substantial private contributions, urban public schools are lavished with generosity and loyalty from their “reformers.” It is time to put the needs of America’s children, who suffer the failure of each new reform effort, before the interests of these stakeholders in the public schools.

Arguments supporting the challenge’s success can be made easily by controlling the standards of measurement, as its defenders do. But one standard truly matters: students’ academic performance. By this measure, urban public schools continue to perform miserably, and Mr. Annenberg’s $500-million challenge will hardly be remembered a decade from now. There is a lesson to be learned.

Patrick J. Reilly
Editor, Foundation Watch
Capital Research Center
Washington