Reader Responses to Supporting Schools

In “Supporting Schools,” her essay in the March/April issue of BAM, President Paxson waxes poetic about Brown’s Annenberg Institute. Perhaps there are valid reasons for singing its praises, but there is also some ugly history. In the mid-1980s Brown’s “educational visionary” Ted Sizer created the touted Coalition for Essential Schools and chose nearby Hope High as a poster child for it. Huge amounts of money and other resources were poured into the school and for a while there were some improvements, but they did not last long.  Annenberg turned to churning out policy papers, ignoring the gradual collapse of the nearby school where so much had earlier been promised. 

There is plenty of blame to go around: the Providence School Department that did not always support the reforms, changing demographics with white flight (Hope is now overwhelmingly Hispanic), new leadership at Brown, etc., but the Annenberg Institute bears a heavy responsibility for the current state of the school. Its vision was flawed, there were dozens of fancy reports, but in the end, Sizer’s Annenberg let Hope down.

With all due respect to the many dedicated teachers and administrators struggling there, Hope today is a failed school. The testing scores of the students are abysmal, truancy rates are high, and no East Side family with other options would think of sending their children there. Apparently, Annenberg is flourishing while the school that was to be a model of reform languishes, sinking deeper into the morass, ignored by the Annenberg Institute just a few blocks away.