What Did the Money Buy?

Critics question the effectiveness of Annenberg grants for education

When Walter H. Annenberg decided to make a major gift to improve America’s public schools,

he settled on $500-million because he hoped that amount would be large enough to “startle” schools, policy makers, and other donors into action.

“I wanted to elevate precollegiate education as a national priority,” the billionaire told his biographer, Christopher Ogden. “To do that I felt I had to drop a bomb.”

Now, more than six years later, most of the money has been distributed, and a $500-million gift is far less likely to startle than it was in 1993, when Mr. Annenberg’s commitment broke philanthropic records for a single gift. Since then, Bill Gates and Ted Turner have each made $1-billion commitments that set a new standard for giving.

But as the last of the Annenberg money trickles out to schools across the country, many observers are asking whether the dollars made a difference. In so doing, they are raising fundamental questions about how much philanthropy can do to solve difficult problems like those facing the nation’s urban schools and how gifts of several-hundred million dollars or more can be parceled out most effectively.

Opinions about how much difference the Annenberg money has made are mixed, depending on whom you talk to. A report released last month by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, in Washington, asserts that the $500-million effort “has only left small footprints” on the school systems it set out to change.

But officials who oversee the Annenberg program say that Fordham and other critics had unrealistic expectations about what $500-million could do — especially given that governments spend billions on education every year. They say their main objective was to improve individual schools in the cities they supported, and they point to rising student test scores in many of those schools as one measure of their success.

Recipients of the grants say the money has helped get more private donors involved in school-improvement projects — in large part because Mr. Annenberg insisted that all his funds be matched with money from private sources. A total of $550-million in matching dollars was raised, three-quarters of it from foundations. However, the Foundation Center reports that the proportion of all foundation grants that go to elementary and secondary education has remained steady, at about 8 percent, throughout the 1990’s.

More than half of the money from Mr. Annenberg’s gift went to schools in America’s biggest cities. The rest went to national education organizations that Mr. Annenberg hoped could help spread good ideas, as well as to arts-education programs. Some $50-million was earmarked for rural schools.

Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who serves as a pro bono adviser to Mr. Annenberg on his philanthropy, says some education experts initially cautioned the billionaire not to invest in large urban school districts, telling him they were tough places to produce results.

“But he did not want us to walk away from urban education,” recalls Mr. Gregorian, noting that Mr. Annenberg thought it was particularly important for immigrants, the poor, and others to receive a good public education. “He believes in Jeffersonian concepts of democracy, and that a democracy needs an educated citizenry,” Mr. Gregorian says.

The $295.2-million that went to large urban school systems was channeled primarily to nine metropolitan areas. The awards, ranging in size from $10-million to $53-million, went to local coalitions of education organizations. The foundation gave the coalitions freedom to take the approaches they wanted.

“We set out with the thought that there is no single one-size-fits-all solution, and that what works in one place doesn’t always work in another place,’’ says Barbara Cervone, national coordinator for the Annenberg Challenge, as the program is known.

Some cities that received Annenberg grants focused on making improvements throughout their school districts. Others concentrated on completely overhauling specific schools, with the idea that once it was clear what worked, they could help other schools adopt the successful practices.

In Philadelphia, the $50-million from the Annenberg Foundation — plus another $100-million in government and private matching funds — paid for professional development for teachers and for the introduction of full-day kindergarten.

“The Annenberg money has been both symbolic and substantive,” says David Hornbeck, Philadelphia’s superintendent of schools. “Philadelphia had wanted full-day kindergarten for decades but it had never happened.”

Mr. Hornbeck says third graders who had full-day kindergarten are now doing better than children in upper grades who didn’t. Meanwhile, throughout Philadelphia, student scores on standardized tests have risen for three years in a row.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, results of the Annenberg program also seem promising. But the region took a very different approach from Philadelphia’s district-wide strategy.

The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative is working with 86 “Leadership Schools” spread across 60 districts in the region. Its strategy has been to help those schools develop stronger academic standards and improve teachers’ professional skills.

The Bay Area almost got left out of the Annenberg program. Originally Mr. Annenberg planned to focus money on the nation’s nine largest school districts, as ranked by student population, and he invited them to submit proposals.

San Francisco, which ranked No. 52 in student-population size, wasn’t eligible. But education officials and grant makers, seeking a way to attract the Annenberg money, joined with districts across the Bay Area and came up with a plan to improve education for about as many students as would be involved in the cities from which Annenberg initially sought proposals.

The key to landing the Annenberg grant was persuading William R. Hewlett, co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard computer company, to step in. Mr. Hewlett promised that if Mr. Annenberg would give $25-million, he would match it with $10-million himself and with $15-million from his foundation. Mr. Annenberg quickly agreed to do so.

Now, nearly five years later, Angela Addiego, principal of the Belle Air Elementary School in San Bruno, says the Bay Area coalition has “provided us with the single most cohesive strategy that I have seen,” and the one that has resulted in the most progress.

One reason for the success, Bay Area educators say, was that the Annenberg money was used to help teachers analyze student test scores and other achievement measures to identify the specific skills low-performing students lack and to find ways to teach those skills. And each year the school’s progress is analyzed in detail by other educators — and teachers take the advice seriously because it comes from their peers.

The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative has also brought together low-income schools like Belle Air with more affluent counterparts in the region. For example, parents from more-affluent schools are being encouraged to volunteer their time in schools with large numbers of poor children, where educators say it can be hard to get parents involved because they may be working two jobs or struggling to learn English.

An evaluation by several Stanford University professors found that the Bay Area approach has had some positive effects. Student-achievement scores rose at 11 of 14 schools that were the first to receive Annenberg money. But the evaluators noted that schools that didn’t receive Annenberg funds were not showing as much progress, and that some school district leaders were unclear what their role should be in spreading the improvements to more schools.

The experience in the Bay Area points to one of the major questions about the Annenberg money. Has it institutionalized change in a long-lasting way, or will improvements fade away when the money runs out?

In its evaluation of the Annenberg program, the Fordham Foundation report said that little was done to ensure permanent change.

Chester E. Finn Jr., the foundation’s president and a top Education Department official during the Reagan administration, suggested in the report that the Annenberg program should have either focused its energy on establishing a common set of academic standards and then holding schools accountable for meeting them or pushed for greater parental choice in the selection of what schools their children attend, whether by vouchers or other “market-oriented” methods.

Instead, they say, the Annenberg Challenge gave schools resources and expertise. But Annenberg didn’t reward schools for improving or punish them for failing, which is what is needed to make lasting changes, says Marci Kanstoroom, the foundation’s research director.

“You don’t want to badmouth someone who has done so much good,” she says of Mr. Annenberg. “But just improving some schools isn’t enough. A lot of people have done that, and we know ways to improve individual schools. But we are not good at improving systems.”

Mark Dowie, a former Mother Jones editor who is writing a book about American foundations, says the Annenberg program seemed to benefit education experts more than kids.

Mr. Dowie says too much of the money went to help education leaders think about and discuss ideas, instead of going directly to the classrooms where poor children were being taught.

“When you create these massive reform institutions, all you’re doing is encouraging educational reformers to continue to breathe their own exhaust,” he says.

Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, in Washington, agrees.

“It placated an awful lot of the people it should have challenged in terms of getting them to work differently,” she says. “The question is, how you get people to think differently about how to deliver education, and that didn’t happen through the Annenberg grant.”

Mr. Gregorian, the Carnegie president and Mr. Annenberg’s adviser, responds that there has been a premature rush to judgment — especially since some of the Annenberg money is still being spent.

He also thinks some critics have unrealistic expectations. “Here is a system trying to fix itself, with a $300-billion annual budget, and we think Annenberg with his $100-million annual budget” can change that system, he says.

Instead, Mr. Gregorian believes that the Annenberg effort should be judged on its success in stimulating educators, grant makers, and political leaders to build school-improvement coalitions at the local level.

Ms. Cervone, the Annenberg Challenge coordinator, says attacks such as those in the Fordham report ignored evidence that the grant money made a difference. But she said that the report does raise a few good points, such as the difficult nature of changing large school systems. Indeed, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, a Brown University center created with $50-million of the $500-million gift, has recently called together education experts to study how to change urban-school districts so that they can better support improvement efforts.

Mr. Annenberg himself has not commented publicly on the criticisms. His secretary, Renee Rogen, said that Mr. Annenberg no longer grants press interviews.

If Mr. Annenberg won’t defend the use of the money, however, plenty of others will. The program “has been a powerful force for keeping public attention on public-education issues,” says Patricia Graham, president of the Spencer Foundation, in Chicago.

The Annenberg program has also attracted the attention of many donors. Some 1,300 other donors — individuals, foundations, and corporations — have contributed matching funds.

Ellen Guiney, executive director of the Boston Plan for Excellence, which helped to oversee the Annenberg effort in that city, says one of the strengths of Mr. Annenberg’s approach was that he was willing to bet on groups with good ideas and give them enough money so they could concentrate their energy on their work instead of on fund raising.

Ms. Guiney says the money was also important because of the authority and credibility it gave her group, both with district officials and with the public.

As a result, she says, her group was more willing to take risks, publishing a report that challenged the Boston district to rethink how it spends money on professional development for teachers, and another that illustrated how difficult it is to hire a teacher.

She says she is disappointed that critics failed to recognize the way groups like hers are prodding school districts to change, taking on teachers’ unions and politicians in the process.

In addition to helping the Boston Plan for Excellence, the Annenberg Challenge has spurred grant makers in the city to change their approach.

After Mr. Annenberg gave $10-million to the Boston schools, the local superintendent, Thomas Payzant, called on grant makers to make a greater effort to work together in support of the district’s school-improvement agenda.

All too often, he told them, grant makers contributed to “project-itis,” investing in a proliferation of unrelated programs that place competing demands on schools.

With the opportunity presented by the infusion of the Annenberg money, he encouraged grant makers to coordinate their efforts to provide more coherent support to the school system.

Thus was born the Fund for Non-Profits, a new organization that is a partnership of nine local grant makers. Together they have pooled $600,000 a year into a common fund that awards grants to local education projects.

Elsewhere, the Annenberg Challenge has led to the birth of a Chicago fund that encourages donors to support education by giving through a centralized charity, and a ”learning network’’ of corporate, community, and private foundations in the Bay Area that meet periodically to learn about such things as state policy changes and technology use in the classroom.

“One of the things foundations do at their best is to really try to generate new knowledge from initiatives like these,” says Bob Schwartz, president of Achieve, a Cambridge, Mass., group that helps states develop academic standards, and former director of the education program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia.

“Success isn’t simply a question of whether test scores go up or whether other donors step forward, although these are both important goals here,” he says. “But success turns on whether enough new knowledge is generated about large-scale urban reform to inform other funders and policy makers.”

Whether it will do this, says Mr. Schwartz, it’s too early to tell.

“I’m really very curious to see what kinds of things start to emerge,” he says. He, and many others, will be watching.

Domenica Marchetti and Amanda Marshall contributed to this article.