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SCHOOL REFORMERS GETTING WISH - UNITY, COMMITMENT LED TO $49.2 MILLION GIFT
Chicago Tribune - January 23, 1995
Author: Charles Storch, Tribune Staff Writer.

EXCERPT

(Theodore Sizer, director of Annenberg’s institute) Sizer also is the founder and chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, also at Brown. For the last decade, the coalition has provided technical support to and forged alliances among urban high schools involved in restructuring. The coalition has been active in Chicago since 1988.

That Annenberg decided to work with the coalition in establishing his program was encouraging to William Ayers , associate professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago . Ayers also is a leader of the Small Schools Workshop, which helps Chicago schools and teachers improve instruction.

“Here’s Annenberg , a very successful, national public citizen,” Ayers said. “He could have given his money to so-called reform projects, like privatized schools in public systems or vouchers. But he picked the coalition, which has a strong record turning around urban high schools.”

Last January, Ayers and Anne Hallett, executive director of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, began contacting local educators, school-system officials, politicians, foundation executives, teachers union leaders and community activists about the Annenberg Challenge . With Warren Chapman, a program officer for the Joyce Foundation, Ayers and Hallett assembled a group of about 30 people to write a proposal, with 70 more providing counsel.

After months of revisions and meetings with other interested parties, the group submitted its proposal to Annenberg ‘s advisers in November. The proposal was approved this month.

The proposal envisions as many as 150 schools working in concert with outside organizations to reduce class size and increase lesson-preparation time for teachers.

Sizer said he and other Annenberg advisers were impressed that many different organizations in Chicago coalesced around the grant proposal.

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A BOOSTER SHOT FOR CHICAGO ‘S PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Chicago Tribune - January 31, 1995
Author: William Ayers , Warren Chapman and Anne Hallett . ; The writers are the authors of the city’s proposal to the Annenberg Foundation. William Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago ; Warren Chapman is a program officer at the Joyce Foundation; and Anne Hallett is the executive director of the Cross-City Campaign for Urban School Reform

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The Chicago Challenge is the work of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, a broad-based group of parents, teachers, citizens and reformers. The theme of the challenge rests on four legs: the professional development and empowerment of teachers; the reorganization of schools into smaller learning environments; community-school partnerships; and system-wide change

In order to improve teaching we need to rethink and reorganize the way teachers use their time to think and plan. We also need to address the unworkable size of large schools and classrooms.

The Annenberg Challenge is designed so that money goes directly to schools working with community partners. The reinvented schools we envision will be places that provide a personalized, more intense and flexible learning experience for students. They will be sites where teachers have the time, authority and encouragement to think and reflect, in essence where they are expected to take risks and get smart.

There will, of course, be failure as well as success. The only intolerable response is to fail to reach, because business-as-usual will result in failure-as-always.

Chicago is several years into the most dramatic and far-reaching reform ever attempted in a big-city school system. Every school now has a democratically-elected local school council made up of parents, teachers and community members who have the the authority to hire and evaluate principals, set school policy, develop and monitor a school improvement plan and approve the school budget. In other words, the councils can initiate many changes without having to ask permission.

Reform has meant that funds earmarked for poor children now flow directly to schools-$440,000 per elementary school on average and $850,000 per high school. Many of the councils have spent these discretionary monies wisely: They have hired more than 3,000 new teachers, brought large numbers of parents and community residents into schools to work with students, purchased needed books and material and strengthened school security.

On the negative ledger, test scores and student achievement in the aggregate remain few. It is important to note that in a massive system that spends more than $250 million a year in discretionary money, $10 million a year for five years will not produce miracles. Further Chicago faces a $300 million budget deficit and the Annenberg funds do not address that problem in any way.

Still Chicago reform unleashed enormous civic energy around education that is paying off. Foundation and corporate grants to improve public education have quadrupled in six years. A strong and growing infrastructure of resources to support schools has been created by community groups, neighborhood organizations, civic agencies, business associations and universities. New ideas and fresh air have flowed freely into our schools.

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