August 14, 2012
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THERE ARE NO TRAFFIC JAMS ALONG THE EXTRA MILE. – Roger Staubach Dear Friends, I don’t know about you but I’m tired of emails clogging my in-box, beckoning at me that “they” have the latest and best and greatest. If I’m lucky, I get a chance to glance at it during the day, park it in a mailbox for later, and by that time, dozens more communications about this or that issue have found their way to me and you know what? Like a bad sale rack after the season is over, the stuff all begins to look the same. Here’s the other thing: The Center for Education Reform (CER) has always prided itself on great customer service. Since 1993, we’ve worked hard to not only solicit your calls and queries, but to make sure you had every chance to talk to a real person, get a real answer or toolkit and make sure your needs are addressed in a real way. The phones used to ring off the hook — in a good way! We knew who you were, what you needed and why, and what’s more, we could then tell your story to the media, to lawmakers and others who may have been skeptical that we were telling the truth when we said people want better schools for their communities and are willing to fight for it! These days many of you thousands who get our alerts, Newswires and press releases are just a name. I’m with you — it’s great to be anonymous sometimes. I’m just not sure that’s really the best way to ensure that the education reform revolution becomes the massive revolt that once began in earnest, before the advent of mass emails. (More on that another time!) It’s been nearly 19 years since we penned our first Monthly Letter to Friends (we published 100!) and nearly 8 years later we became the first education organization to deliver a weekly email missive (The CER Newswire debuted on January 10, in the year 2000 and has continued unabated for 12 years engaging and entertaining thousands since, along with hundreds of good and not-so-good copycats!) And so it’s time to shake things up — again. As I shared with our colleagues at CER’s 18th Anniversary, Rockin’ Reform Revue last fall, where the first ever “EdReformies” were awarded to eight stellar individuals and fellow EdReformers entertained and rocked the night away, we’ve always been unconventional in our approach to reform and in our approach to getting more people onboard. I’ve decided that while the written word can indeed move mountains, we have decided to go the extra mile in our approach to our various communiqués, so that their impact can be more strongly felt. So, effective today, Newswire will become a daily news digest, and you’ll be able to sign up for these updates daily. We’ve offered this service all along on our blog Edspresso, and it is what drives much of our work at the Center each day. But we feel it is a better service to you – our customers – if you have greater access to this tool. If you like our insights and our products, you’ll love the New Letter to Friends even more. A couple of pages of news and insights you will not get anywhere else will share space with insights from the past, and lessons from the front where real policies and people have forged battles once thought unattainable — and won. When we stop striving to question what we do and whether it’s the right thing or good enough, we lose. Thankfully, I hate to lose, and so, I’m happy to examine what’s gone before, what might go in the future, and how you can help play a role in both. Along with my fine leadership team, we will be augmenting the work you find at Edreform.com and coming to you at least monthly, on paper or electronically, (choice is up to you) the New Letter to Friends for you to open and read at your leisure. That is, if you choose to join us. You’ll need to opt in, not opt out, for this new donation-based subscription service, but we will give you a few weeks to make a decision. Someone smart once said that being invested in something drives one to do more with it. We think with your support, it will drive us to keep making a better product. We’d love your feedback, so please take just a few minutes now to fill out this quick survey and we’ll send you a complimentary copy of The School Reform Handbook: How to Improve Your Schools! And, we will continue to deploy the best in social media through The Media Bullpen, through our Twitter and Facebook accounts and of course, our exceptional website which hosts and promotes the latest innovations, ideas, and efforts to ensure activism and accuracy for better educational choices and accountability in all schools. You can log onto www.edreform.com any hour of the day and get the latest on state and local efforts and activism, the latest news and our insights. As for our CER Newswire and its jam-packed library, we’ll be bringing you more news from there. This year, as we head into our 20th anniversary, The Center for Education Reform remains the pioneer and leading advocate for substantive, structural change in American education. Its people and policies have helped fuel an exciting generation of reforms and new activists challenging the proverbial conventional wisdom day in and day out. Our work has led to 1 billion impressions in the media on reform, millions of new school choices and dozens of new laws. Oh yes, and it’s made a lot of people really angry for challenging their old and iron clad protection of a tired and worn out system. We’ve scripted ads and movies, laws and regulations. We’ve inspired people to come into and stay in reform, and argued for — and against — appointments to commissions and agencies, hoping good people would do good things once chosen. That hasn’t always turned out to be the case, anymore than our kids always make the right choices. But just like we examine what we can do to help our own children day after day, we can examine what happens with people and policies to determine how we can all do better. Once upon a time it was our dream — to make Education Reform mainstream, to make it cool, and to ensure it transcended all ideologies. We’ve succeeded in that. Now it’s time to go the “extra mile” to make sure being mainstream and cool keeps getting results. I hope you’ll look forward to our new communication. Be sure to let us know how best to get it to you and to receive your free copy of The School Reform Handbook. Best Regards, |