Was the Annenberg Challenge a “total failure”?

Campaign of fear impacts school research

Here’s how badly the Ownership Society types have politicized school research and evaluation. Check out Andrew J. Coulson’s, “The Wreck of the Annenberg” at National Review. Coulson is a honcho at the Cato Institute. They’re the ones who invented the term Ownership Society and sold it to Bush to use as the banner hanging over his current global economic collapse. Too bad, he can’t pin that TOTAL FAILURE on me or Bill Ayers.

But Coulson does write off the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) as a “total failure” making Ayers and Obama the main culprits. He cites no evidence, no evaluations, no experts—nothing to confirm his “total failure” summary. While it’s true that Annenberg didn’t markedly raise Chicago’s test scores—no single reform effort ever does-- the very evaluation from the highly-respected Consortium on Chicago School Research, which Coulson refers to in his hatchet job on Annenberg, shows several positive gains for the CAC. Coulson chooses to ignore this side of the report for political expediency and ideological reasons. He writes:

It failed not just in Chicago, but around the country. The first problem was that many of the “model” schools and districts lacked results worthy of replication. The final report of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for instance, noted that, overall, students in its model schools had learned no more than students in regular public schools.

To Coulson and the neocons, reform of any public institution is always a failed proposition. Why? Because they don’t believe public anything is reform-able. Secondly, as long as you don’t have to cite any real research, take into account any real goals or standards for the reform, or document anything you say, you can call anything a total failure and no one can really argue with you.

Coulson never explains exactly how Ayers/Obama caused this global total failure of Republican Walter Annenberg’s pet project, stuck as they both were, in Chicago. But that’s another matter.

For one thing, the CAC to its credit, never even called for replicating their “model schools.” That’s not what the initiative was about. The Chicago project was originally aimed at seeing how time, size and teacher isolation factored into school improvement. There was a small group of so-called Breakthrough Schools which were given extra resources and tried more focused and intensive reform efforts. But they were hardly models—more like experiments- and only a small part of the CAC initiative. And while this small group of Breakthrough Schools (not replicable models) didn’t immediately (in the one year they were measured) boost test scores, they did, according to the Consortium study, improve the “student learning climate” and lay the foundation for “subsequent development of instruction…” in those schools.

So how could Coulson read the very same study and conclude that Annenberg was a “total failure?” Answer? He couldn’t. He’s making the shit up.

Besides, Coulson isn’t really concerned with program evaluation. His case is ideological. Bill Ayers, ‘60s radical, was somehow involved with Annenberg. So was his terrorist-pal Obama. Ergo, the program was not only destined to become a “total failure” but was an omen of things to come when socialist Obama becomes president. His entire program for K-12 education will supposedly become a replication of this old, totally-failed Annenberg Challenge where the kids won’t learn any more stuff than they do in regular schools.

Isn’t this the same kind of counterfeit program evaluation we’ve been seeing for the past eight years coming out of the DOE, whether it be of the ideologically-bound Reading First program or of NCLB’s testing madness? The whole purpose of program evaluation is to help us draw lessons from various efforts to improve teaching and public education. But if you enter the process with the mindset that there’s really nothing to be learned and when you’re only goal is to discredit a political candidate, this is what you end up with.

Finally, why the deafening silence from CAC leaders themselves and from the researchers at the Consortium in the face of this assault on their own research? Is the fear campaign working?