Scared Monkeys Discussion Forum

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. Classroom behavior and other non-academic measures "were weaker in 2001 than before the Challenge." And even the schools that did show meaningful improvement couldn't be consistently replicated within the Challenge districts themselves, let alone around the nation.

In an odd quirk of history, the Wreck of the Annenberg was foreshadowed by President Clinton during the launch ceremony. Clinton thanked Annenberg for his generosity, and added that the "people in this room who have devoted their lives to education are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can't seem to replicate it everywhere else." Clinton would go on to explain that the most pressing need in American education is "to have a system to somehow take what is working and make it work everywhere. Nobody has unraveled this mystery."

A careful reading of The Wealth of Nations was not the only way to discover that markets of competing schools automatically disseminate effective practices. A moment's reflection on the meteoric growth of private tutoring firms would have been enough. The Kumon tutoring chain began in Japan in 1954, and had a worldwide enrollment in the millions by the mid 1990s. Today it enrolls 4 million students in 45 countries. In the U.S., Kumon has 1,280 locations and continues to grow rapidly — as do its competitors, such as Sylvan Learning and Huntington.

This for-profit tutoring industry has proven the validity of Adam Smith's analysis: parent-driven educational marketplaces provide incentives that automatically encourage the replication of effective models, just as they ensure the freedoms that allow such replication to take place.

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama shared an office. Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop, the one Obama directed all that money to is located at 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607 [Note the link is to a year 2000 version of their website]. Here’s a screen grab from the website’s footer:

In 1998, the address for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where Obama presumably worked, was 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607. Here’s a copy of their 1998 tax return with that address: