$53-Million Grant to Boost L.A. County School Reform : Education: Annenberg Foundation goal is more individualized teaching. Matching funds must be raised.

An ambitious effort to consolidate many of the myriad public school reform efforts in Los Angeles County under one umbrella, while transforming hundreds of campuses into laboratories of change, will be launched today with a $53-million challenge grant from the Annenberg Foundation.

The program, which is short on specifics, will seek to help selected “families” of schools create idyllic settings in which teachers are highly trained and motivated, parents are deeply involved and students’ intellectual curiosity is cultivated. It will also seek to achieve efficiencies of scale by linking philosophically similar reform efforts that operate under various names throughout the county.

The first challenge facing the project’s corporate, university and community backers is raising local matching funds. But developers of the so-called Los Angeles Metropolitan Project (LAMP) said money already being spent on school reform, as well as public funds, can be used for that purpose, along with donations from private foundations and corporations.

The money--$106 million, if fund-raising goals are met--could start flowing as soon as matching funds materialize. The Annenberg funds will not be used to hire more teachers, buy books or computers or renovate school buildings. Rather, they are intended to go for training teachers, gathering data, analyzing the progress of schools toward a set of specific goals and making it possible for school faculties and principals to discuss the needs of individual students.

The grant is the second awarded to a school district as part of a half-billion-dollar private gift--the largest ever to public education--that philanthropist and publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg announced a year ago. A project in New York City received $50 million in September, and grants for projects in Chicago and Philadelphia are to be finalized soon.

USC President Steven B. Sample, who convened the group that wrote Los Angeles’ application for Annenberg funds, said that at the very least it will regenerate support for the public schools in the county among corporate leaders as well as parents and others in the community.

What it will not do, he said, is save public education.

“Nobody here from LAMP is holding LAMP out as the savior of Los Angeles County schools,” Sample said. “This is a step toward school improvement and school reform and it could prove five years from now to be a very real step. It has some real money in it. It’s not all smoke and mirrors.”

The LAMP project boils down to an effort to help often-chaotic campuses find ways to create more intimate school settings where students can get personalized attention. Incentives would be offered for teachers to stay at one school over a period of years so faculties could develop coherent methods of serving students.

Those teachers would also be encouraged to develop educational approaches that mesh with those of the other schools in their families. The hope, according to documents describing the project, is that schools with stable faculties and consistent teaching methods will work to reduce the constant turnover in students that many campuses experience.

“Stability, we believe, is the basic threshold requirement for creating true learning communities,” a summary of the program reads.

But the causes of instability often have little to do with the schools themselves and, therefore, will be difficult for the project to address. Another problem facing LAMP is its lack of specificity. Although schools will be given broad latitude to find the reforms that work for them, the pathway to success, which often is not obvious, will not be prescribed.

The chairman of the board will be Virgil Roberts, a record company executive who has served on the boards of two of the major school reform efforts in Los Angeles County--LEARN, which stands for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, and the Los Angeles Educational Partnership.

“The challenge is to change entire school systems so we don’t have a few schools that are examples of excellence, but that excellence is the norm . . . for all of our children,” Roberts said. “It’s a difficult goal because it requires changing the way we do the business of education.”

The board’s first responsibility is to hire an executive director who has credibility with unions, educators, researchers and corporate leaders. An executive search firm is conducting a nationwide hunt for candidates for that job, which Roberts said he hopes will be filled by the end of January.

The board’s next responsibility is to select the families of schools, each of which will consist of about five schools and include a high school and middle school. Each school has to sign a contract committing it to a series of “action principles,” which include finding ways to give teachers more time to work with individual students and with other teachers, and reporting publicly on academic progress.

Roberts said he hopes the first batch of schools can be selected and ready to begin operating under the new structure by September.

The board also is responsible for eliminating schools or families from the project if they do not meet their goals, which are spelled out in a detailed “learning plan” that is part of the basis for their acceptance into the program.

Project organizers stress that LAMP will work with the other major reform efforts in the county. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, in fact, schools have to join LEARN to be considered for membership in LAMP.

The 4-year-old LEARN effort involves 87 campuses in the Los Angeles district where principals and teachers are given greater power to control curriculum and finances, social services are made available and school staffs are held accountable for the outcome.

The first reports on the performance of those schools are due in January. But the Los Angeles Board of Education has established a goal of having all of its more than 700 schools join the LEARN movement within five years.

LEARN President Mike Roos said LAMP validates the work of his organization and will extend its successes to schools elsewhere in the county. But, he acknowledged, it is too early to quantify the impact that LEARN, which operates on an annual budget of about $2 million, has had on student learning.

He said the Annenberg-funded project is “awesome and, symbolically, it says that school reform is going to take place in Los Angeles.”

Another reform project that has been in the spotlight for its focus on remaking schools from the ground up is the Los Angeles Educational Partnership. That organization has about $8.5 million to spend over three years to create two campuses, one near USC and one in the southeast Los Angeles County city of Cudahy, that are cutting-edge models of technology and instruction.

LAEP spokesman John McDonald said the new project creates an opportunity to link the many reform efforts and to make better use of the money that each has to spend.

“Hopefully what is developing here is a critical mass that is going to push school reform ahead,” McDonald said. “The idea behind this is that everyone would work together, and we would certainly be willing to do that.”

One way LAMP will do that is to create a think tank of sorts enabling the various educational reform efforts to share ideas as well as office space if they desire. Another initiative that would spread the progress among LAMP schools and schools countywide is the construction of a computer network for electronic mail, voice transmission and video.

Theodore R. Mitchell, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and one of the key architects of LAMP, said some schools in the county already are operating the way LAMP and other reform efforts recommend. Others are working in that direction and need a boost. And still others are stuck in the past and have a long way to go. He said membership in LAMP is open to all three types of schools.

“We know change is hard, and we believe that it takes the community coming together to help schools change,” Mitchell said. “Schools aren’t out there on their own. They’re tied in to a whole network of schools, teachers and parents who are all starting to pull on the oars in the same direction.”