Executive Director’s Report: Fund-raising drive for Center launched

By Anne L. Bryant

5/3/05 -- Two years ago, our state school boards association leaders identified a huge challenge in public education: Unless school leaders could find a way to work together to build greater understanding of the critical importance of our public schools among the American people, we would continue to see an erosion of public confidence in and support for our schools.

Today, too often, the public’s understanding and opinion of public education is based on faulty impressions and negative commentary.

We know that the public relies on personal conversations and local media as their primary sources of information about their schools. The sea of information about education issues is vast and murky, filled with confusion, bias, inconsistency, and sheer volume.

For example, anyone seeking information about a hot topic, such as class size, faces an enormous challenge. A search for this topic on the Internet yields some 33 million references. It’s hard to know which sources can be trusted, whether a report is backed by data or is just someone’s opinion, or whether the information has any relevance to one’s own school district.

Clearly, the need for an objective and trusted resource for education research and information is immense.

In our search for a solution, the Center for Public Education was born. At last year’s Annual Conference, I spoke about NSBA’s vision to create a central resource to tell the facts about public education -- in plain English with balanced information.

This Center would provide important information, tools, and publications for state associations, school board members, other educational leaders, and the public to help them make well-informed, effective decisions. The Center would capitalize on the power of the Internet to be fast, comprehensive, accessible, and interactive. And its only bias would be that it’s pro-public education.

The Center’s mission is to serve as the trusted source for validated public education research, information, and tools.

In the past year, we have developed some very specific goals for the Center:

(1) The Center will provide credible information on the successes, accomplishments, and challenges in K-12 public education. We will talk about our problems and look for solutions.

(2) The Center will create awareness and understanding of present and emerging issues, which will encourage conversation and dialogue based on facts. We believe that information leads to knowledge and knowledge can lead to action -- action to improve our schools and engage our communities.

(3) The Center will articulate the value of public education as the solid foundation of our democracy and global economy.

Over the past year, the vision of the Center grew into a dream to reach beyond our immediate “family” of school board members and administrators and to re-engage the public in public education.

We envision an awareness campaign reaching out to legislators, policymakers, the media, parents, and the public, drawing them to the Center and showing them the successes and challenges in public education.

The potential of the Center to have a major positive impact on public education is generating real excitement -- and our vision is quickly becoming a reality.

Already, the Center is telling the success stories of public schools: for example, how the Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas is reducing truancy, how the Pinellas County, Fla., school board won a tax increase to raise teacher salaries and bolster reading and arts programs, how the Daylight/Twilight High School in Trenton, N.J., is bringing dropouts of all ages back to school, and how the Kansas City, Kan., school board’s communitywide “First Things First” initiative is leading to higher student achievement.

You can read more about these initiatives and other success stories from all over the country on the Center’s website, www.nsba.org/PublicEd.

The Center has developed a rigorous process to select the best education research and outlined a standardized format for presenting those research results. This format allows a user to quickly scan the key findings or to drill down into more comprehensive analysis.

Over the next year, NSBA will expand the Center’s website to include more school success stories, easy-to-use search tools, and credible research summaries -- tools that will help you engage the community and speak to the public. Along the way, we will gather input from those who use the Center to help guide future developments.

For the past several months, we have worked closely with a dedicated and task-driven staff, corporate partners, state school boards associations, and school board members to establish a strategy to make the Center’s long-term vision a reality.

At the forefront of this effort are the National School Boards Foundation Board of Trustees and NSBA’s Board of Directors.

I have never been as motivated by any single action as I am by the efforts of these two boards to establish the Center for Public Education. When the project was presented to these boards, they embraced it with valuable insight, new perspectives, and a desire to move forward aggressively.

After the due diligence of a comprehensive feasibility study, the Foundation voted to move forward with a capital fund-raising campaign to support the Center.

Our goal is to raise $7 million in five-year pledges over the next 12 months. This campaign goal will cover the fund raising for a major national awareness campaign, as well as research, tools, and infrastructure for the Center.

We knew that to address the critical challenges in public education, we needed the support from NSBA, the Foundation, state associations, corporations, and individuals.

Many corporations are eager to support education to improve our future work force, and we believe successful corporate partnerships are critical to our future.

Several corporations already have made significant donations in support of the Center, and they have demonstrated visionary leadership to public education. Among them are Brokers’ Risk Placement Service; ARAMARK; Pearson Education; Munich American RiskPartners, a division of American Re-Insurance Co.; and Sodexho School Services.

In addition, two state school boards associations -- Texas and Illinois -- have already stepped forward with leadership and financial support for the campaign.

[For a more complete list of the major donors to the Center so far, see the report on page 3.]

I am overwhelmed by the generosity of the corporations, state associations, and individuals who have launched our campaign.