Annenberg pays for education innovation

Billionaire philanthropist and University graduate Walter H. Annenberg has managed to outspend the federal government on education. At a White House ceremony held in December, Annenberg announced a $500 million dollar gift to help reform and improve public schooling and education in America. Heralded as the "Annenberg Challenge," the bulk of the gift – $400 million's worth – will be spent on directly supporting school systems across the country that show the most promise in promoting educational reform and improvement. To help with this selection, Annenberg asked his long-time friend and former University Provost Vartan Gregorian to serve as a pro bono advisor. Gregorian, currently president of Brown University, said Annenberg's gift will act as "a catalyzing yeast to highlight what works" in American school systems. Gregorian also said the $500 million Annenberg pledged to reform public education is 25 percent more than the Department of Education allotted to the cause from its entire budget last year. But Gregorian cautioned that the money is not a cure-all for every educational problem facing the nation. "It took a long time for these schools to deteriorate," he said. "This is not a panacea – there is no overnight solution." The other $100 million has already been allocated to several educational reform organizations across the country. Brown's brand new Annenberg National Institute for School Reform, nominally founded last October with an anonymous $5 million donation, will use $50 million from Annenberg to endow all its future operations. The Institute, under the direction of Brown Professor and noted author on education Theodore Sizer, will work closely with another organization at Brown, the 10-year-old Coalition of Essential Schools. The two groups at Brown will use Annenberg's gift to "build alliances and take the dialogue to a new level," the Coalition's School's Coordinator Ted McEnroe said. Another $50 million of the gift has already been promised to the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC), based in Arlington, Virginia. Led by former Xerox CEO David T. Kearns, NASDC was formed in 1991 as a private, non-partisan organization to support the design and creation of high-performance schools. Annenberg's single $50 million gift to NASDC nearly matches all the funds it raised over the last three years from numerous private and corporate sources. NASDC, the only organization operating nationally to develop new approaches to education, has already funded 140 schools in 20 states as innovative educational test sites, NASDC spokesperson Paige Cassidy said. After another year of directly funding the test-programs, aided in part by the Annenberg gift, the organization will "spread the good news" from the test schools to other schools across the nation in an effort to "replicate their successes," Cassidy said. Gregorian said Annenberg's most recent act of philanthropy will have a wide-reaching impact on the future of American education. "Annenberg may do for the public school systems what Carnegie did for libraries," he said. "We need to get back to basics and protect the dignity of teaching and teachers."