August 28, 2005
Anniston Star
By John Fleming

CHATTANOOGA — Dan Challener’s office window looks out on a city remade: An impressive urban renewal project, complete with a fine river walk, a delightful pedestrian bridge, outstanding aquariums and a glimmering downtown.

He’s not a contractor, but he has helped pour the foundations of change in Chattanooga and Hamilton County. But his efforts have been aimed at the reconstruction of the public education system.

You can say he’s been very much a part of a concerted effort here to reform the 40,000-student county-wide education system. In fact, he has headed the agency that has been the driving force behind these changes, the Public Education Foundation.

What Challener will tell you, in his office hovering above the new Chattanooga, is that in his many years of involvement in public education reform he has learned a tremendous amount.

One lesson, however, hovers above the rest.

“The idea of the public education foundation has been around for about 20 years,” he said. “What we have learned in 20 years is that it isn’t all about the money. It is about how you use the money to bring about transformative change.”

And, he argues, the vehicle for achieving that transformative change and spending that money is the Public Education Foundation.

The PEF, as it is called here, is not unique. There are organizations like this one in 31 states and in more than 1,200 school districts, according to the Public Education Network in Washington. They all have slightly different approaches and tailor their work depending on the needs of their education systems. But they are seen as crucial to any effort at comprehensive public education reform.

What is a PEF?
They are independent of the school board, the superintendent, the chamber of commerce and the political leadership. They are non-profits supported by individual contributions, often with help from the business community and outside foundations. They are, as you will frequently hear in Chattanooga and Raleigh and Mobile and other places with effective education foundations, a critical friend of the school system.

That is to say, good PEFs stand behind the school system when it deserves support and gives it a good scolding when it deserves it, but always promotes the need for improved public education.

The folks in the education reform business, the ones who have witnessed and been part of successful efforts, say a solid PEF is vital. Don’t even attempt reform without one. In fact, PEF officials in Chattanooga and Raleigh and Mobile — three cities this editor has visited in the last few months —- all urge the creation of a very strong equivalent organization in our area.

In Anniston, of course, we have the City Schools Foundation. The foundation, which has on its board the publisher of The Anniston Star, Brandt Ayers, has done some impressive work. The foundation head, Catherine Chappell, has amassed a couple of hundred volunteers that have done invaluable work at local elementary schools.

But this is a different kind of animal than what is being advocated by Chattanooga and the other cities. The Anniston City Schools Foundation had a budget of about $100,000 last year. There are two people on staff. There is not the kind of comprehensive plan for long-term transformation in place and there is an absence of substantial foundational support. Additionally, it supports only one system.

Jacksonville also has a foundation. In recent years it has been dormant, but it has experienced some recent activity. Because of a failed effort in the city to raise taxes for schools Jacksonville’s foundation is being looked at with renewed interest. Again, though, the focus, enhanced computer technology, is narrow and the current budget is small.

So, the question is, why not explore creating a public education foundation that looks after the needs of all of our public schools in all of Calhoun County? Surely no one argues with the need for comprehensive reform. Does anyone think that we could do without improvement?

Chattanooga, Raleigh and Mobile are very different from our situation. They are all, for example, unified systems and each one much bigger than Calhoun County’s five systems put together (we have a total of 18,000 students). Still, they all offer this lesson: If we want to embark on meaningful change, then establishing a meaningful, well-funded PEF is a good place to start.

And here are some reasons to do it from some people in Chattanooga:

Additional funding
“Without the PEF we would not have given the money,” said Corinne Allen, the executive director of the $105 million-endowed Benwood Foundation.

The money she refers to is a $5 million grant to support a program called the Benwood Initiative that has set out with the PEF in partnership with the education system to turn around the worst performing schools in the Hamilton County system. Now in the midst of a five-year plan, the program has shown such success it has inspired Benwood, a Chattanooga-based philanthropic group, to totally refocus its mission. (See chart.)

Bill Kennedy, a former high school principal, administers a PEF program aimed at improving middle and high schools called Schools for a New Society. It is funded by an $8 million grant from the Carnegie Foundation, with additional money from the Gates Foundation and a matching grant of $6 million raised by the PEF locally. A related $1.5 million grant, designed to keep and acquire effective teachers from the locally-based Osborne Foundation, is also administered within the PEF.

Kennedy’s got some serious funding to do some work that is also showing results. But he says the money wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the PEF, pointing out that many foundations will not work in communities without independent partners.

“Look,” he says, “you can get federal Department of Education money, but you aren’t going to get this kind of foundational support without having an independent PEF. It’s just not going to happen.”

Simply put, then, if you try to launch education reform without a PEF you are basically cutting yourself out of a potentially huge funding stream. Not having a PEF just doesn’t make sense.

Chattanooga is exceedingly lucky in that it has a number of deep-pocketed philanthropy groups that have a history of helping locally — Benwood, Osborne, The Lyndhurst Foundation, among others —- but the fact is, neither the local groups nor national ones would have pumped the money into the system without the PEF showing that it is independent and that it could be a partner with the school system.

It’s not a pass-through
It is also important to show potential funders that your PEF is not simply a funding mechanism.

Groups such as the Annenberg Foundation, Carnegie, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Gates, all supporters of the Hamilton County system, are only interested in dealing with communities that are serious about reforms that can bring about substantive change. You aren’t going to catch the attention of major funders by giving teachers mini-grants that expire at the end of the school year, say the Chattanooga reformers. Serious public education foundations and foundations investing in education want to see attempts to create better societies.

Real-world solutions
Here’s how the thinking goes within good PEFs: Be innovative, strive to make a difference not only in bumping up reading scores for third graders, but by instilling in the community real hope for the future.

Chattanooga’s PEF, for example, helped to put together a grant and later funding for a program that aimed to reduce the number of dropouts. Data specialists at the PEF identified those prone to dropout and those who already had. These kids were interviewed at length.

What PEF staff discovered was that many of them were dropping out because they could not see the real world applicability of the work they were doing, especially the math.

PEF, in partnership with the schools, developed a plan where algebra and geometry teachers spent an entire summer with building contractors. With the help of the contractors, the texts were basically rewritten to show how seemingly obscure formulas could be used in construction.

Great, not just good
You simply cannot miss the fact that something big is being attempted in Hamilton County and Chattanooga.

“We don’t just want good public schools,” said Jim Hill, a PEF board member who was posted at Fort McClellan in the 1960s. “We want great public schools. We see what we do here as a catalyst for bold initiatives. We want whole school change, but in bringing about these changes we are also building civic capacity, we’re building a better community.”

You might say Hill wants people in this part of Tennessee to be proud of their school system, something that will make you proud of the greater community. It’s hard to believe, for example, that Chattanoogans would have gotten behind an urban renewal project as big as the one you see here, if they did not have a lot of confidence in the long-term future.

Hill goes on to give another reason to have a public education foundation.

PEFs, he insists, can do the kind of creative thinking and planning for transformative change that school administrators simply do not have time for.

“The schools just can’t do it alone,” said Hill. “They need help. Can you really expect the schools to be entrepreneurial, to be innovative when there is so much on their plates already?”

Corinne Allen of the Benwood Foundation puts it like this: “I have a lot of respect for educators, but if they could have implemented substantive changes, they would have done it themselves by now. All public school administrators could use some help.”

A robust leader
Challener, president of Chattanooga’s Public Education Foundation, is smart, innovative and on fire about education reform.

And that kind of person, people in Chattanooga, Raleigh and Mobile will tell you, is another vital ingredient in an effective PEF.

Challener’s got a kind of restless energy that is all about getting things done, pushing initiatives, cajoling the powerful along. He may not be universally liked, but he is universally respected.

He’s been involved in education reform efforts for many years, plenty of time to discard the more superficial approaches to change and to engage fully with the more complex ones.

And with that in mind, he says, “We don’t do anything around here without knowing exactly what we want to accomplish out of it and what our goal will be in five years.”

In his opinion the mission is a large one indeed, for he feels like the nation in general has lost confidence with the public education system and that it is up to groups like the Chattanooga PEF to get it back.

Meanwhile, in the board room
How, though, does all of this translate into what is tangible for the community, for individuals? As it does with almost everything, just boil it down to money.

As Jim Hill puts it, economic development and public education are attached at the hip.

As Tom Edd Wilson, the spirited president of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce puts it, in this rapidly changing world, the area’s very future depends on the success of public education. “In the near future Chattanooga will be talking about competing not with Huntsville, Ala., but with some city in China,” he said.

Public education is crucial and the better your system is, the better chance you have of landing new opportunities for the people in your community, he argued.

Wilson has noticed, as have other business leaders around the South, that when potential investors come to town one of the first questions they ask is what kind of public education system does the community have.

Recently, Hamilton County landed a new T-Mobile facility that will employ several hundred people.

J. Ed Marston, also of the chamber, said T-Mobile executives actually conducted two rounds of interviews with the human resources departments of other local companies before deciding to come to Chattanooga.

“They wanted to make sure they were satisfied with the workforce development situation in the area,” said Marston. “Companies are very concerned about this. Education, workforce development is always one of the first questions asked.”

South to Calhoun
The same, of course, applies to Anniston and all of Calhoun County. If we think we can undergo an economic renaissance without undertaking education reform, without improving our worst schools, then we are kidding ourselves.

And as Chattanooga and Raleigh and Mobile make clear, the equivalent of a public education foundation is an essential ingredient in any attempt at change.

Speaking directly to the political, business and educational leadership in Anniston and Calhoun County, Dan Challener urged the formation of a robust PEF, but stressed that such an effort would not come easy.

“You need vision,” he said. “You have to have people who care deeply about schools, the children and the overall health of the community.”

He paused a moment in his office hovering above the green and glimmering new downtown Chattanooga before saying, “this kind of transformation; it is not for the faint of heart.”