Annenberg’s Education Gift Lauded by Clinton : Donation: President says the philanthropist’s $500-million grant will help advance a ‘standard of excellence.’ He believes troubled schools will find remedies that have been successful elsewhere.

WASHINGTON — President Clinton hailed the largest single gift to public education Friday by lauding the donor, philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg, as a man who “has challenged the rest of us to match his efforts.”

The President, in a White House ceremony, called Annenberg’s gift of $500 million for elementary and secondary school reform projects “a remarkable and truly wonderful thing (that) could not have come at a better time.”

He said that the funds will help promote a “standard of excellence” for education that can be adapted, school by school, across the country.

The grant money, to be coordinated by the National Institute for School Reform at Brown University, is aimed at turning into reality recent ideas for restructuring schools, ranging from the use of new computer technologies to keeping schools open in the evenings and on weekends.

The institute promotes school reform projects, among them the Coalition of Essential Schools, a network of more than 500 secondary public schools. Grants will be distributed on a matching basis, with additional funds to be raised from other individuals, corporations and foundations.

Clinton said that the record gift will help troubled schools find remedies that have proved to be successful elsewhere.

“Nearly every problem has been solved by somebody, somewhere,” he said.

Education Secretary Richard W. Riley, who attended the ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, said that the money “will enable us to pick up the pace dramatically in our continuing efforts to create national standards of excellence . . . and end this continuing conspiracy of low expectations.”

Annenberg’s latest grant, to be disbursed over five years, tops the record for educational giving which he set last June by awarding $365 million to four schools, including USC. Annenberg, 85, said at the time that he planned to give away most of his $1.6-billion fortune to education and the arts.

Under terms of the grant, officials said most funds will go “to support teachers, pupils, schools and school systems throughout the country that are making earnest and well-designed efforts to change the way children are educated and to colleges, universities and other agencies that are cooperating in the task.”

These organizations have not yet been selected, a task that is to be completed by next June.

Annenberg, a former publishing magnate who was ambassador to Britain during the Richard Nixon Administration, paid special attention to the problem of school violence in his brief remarks.

“We must ask ourselves whether improving education will halt the violence,” he said. “If anyone can think of a better way, we may have to try that. But the way I see this tragedy, education is the most wholesome and effective approach.”

He said that he hopes educational reform could help resolve the despair of many young Americans.

“Like all of you, I am so troubled at the growing despair of so many young people,” Annenberg said. “They aren’t just dropping out of school in many cases, but many seem to be giving up on America. And there’s almost a direct correlation, as we can notice, of dropping out of school and leading this life of despair, of violence, of poverty, of spiritual numbness.”

But he said one gift cannot solve these problems. “This must be a challenge to the nation,” he said. “It will take individual giving, corporate giving and foundation giving to do the job.”

Annenberg made his fortune through publications, particularly TV Guide, Seventeen magazine and the Daily Racing Form. He sold his Triangle Publications to Rupert Murdoch for $3 billion in 1988.