A Lot of Money to Do Good With : The Annenberg grant is an important help for education; now reformers must keep focus

Los Angeles County is indeed fortunate to be one of the recipients of a $53-million grant to improve public education. The Annenberg Foundation’s generous challenge grant will be worth as much as $106 million because the foundation will match each dollar privately raised. That’s a lot of money to do good with, though not enough to do miracles with. Focusing expectations on what can be accomplished with the grant and then making sure that the Los Angeles community can see and feel the results are crucial to both real and perceived success.

The L.A. area is receiving a sizable chunk of the largest private donation ever made to public education. The gift is designed to encourage widespread reform and improvement of public education--not as a way to pay for more teachers, buy more materials or build more classrooms. The average parent would like to pour more money into the classroom, buying more computers and new books. This grant will not do that. But it can do other things. Its reform mission must be clearly articulated and reiterated by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Project (LAMP) board, composed of university, corporate and community leaders who will administer the grant.

Clarity of purpose is important to maintain and grow support for this extraordinary opportunity. The grant has a five-year life; come 2000, LAMP will know it has been truly successful if the people of Los Angeles, especially parents of schoolchildren, can look back on the Annenberg grant as coming around the time that public schools in Los Angeles began to get better.

LAMP is not, as USC President Steven B. Sample has pointed out, the savior of public education. LAMP will merely build upon the significant reforms already under way in the area--Los Angeles Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN), the Los Angeles Educational Partnership (LAEP) and others. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, only schools that have joined the ongoing LEARN effort will be eligible to benefit from LAMP. By working with already established reform groups, LAMP hopes 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,” said Virgil Roberts, a business leader and chairman of the LAMP board. “It’s a difficult goal because it requires changing the way we do the business of education.”

Indeed it is a difficult goal. But Los Angeles can have no goal more worthy or necessary as the county looks toward the 21st Century.