Add Marketing and Business Schools to this discussion if possible

[Daniel Bassill]

Building and sustaining high quality learning centers in high poverty neighborhoods is a marketing problem, not an education problem. At every university with a graduate school of education, there is also a graduate business school. Why not try to connect students and faculty from each discipline so that they can pool their talent and help us reach this goal?

I've started a Business School Connection on the Tutor/Mentor Connection web site, and have been building a list of links to Business Schools with social benefit programs in place.

Here's a presentation done for me by students at Indiana University. This is from the School of Information, which is another potential partner for those who want to see more and better schools and non-school learning and mentoring centers available to kids living in high poverty neighborhoods.

It seems to me that universities have great potential to create these multi-discipline teams and focus them on the problems and solutions that we discuss in forums like this.

[Ed Jones]

Daniel, Sometime last year there was news of one of the MBA schools running a program for principals. Unfortunately, I cannot remember where it was (thought it was in Texas), and cannot now find any info.

Yet, I think we need to add to this thought. Teachers as a group appear to have a remarkable lack of understanding of the basic principles of economics. Any discussion of either structural reform of schools or broader public policy issues too often bogged down by a view of government and economic activity that mirrors the old propensity to blame all evil on the evil spirits. Today we've renamed these evil spirits "capitalism", "multi-national corporations", "school admin", etc.

We need for all teachers to learn some basic economics, starting with an understanding of how much teachers' pension funds make off the companies they deplore.

[Daniel Bassill]

Ed, that may be an important issue, but it's not what I had in mind when I posted this message. I'm trying to teach educators, volunteers, community members, and businesses to use advertising and marketing concepts to reach out to people who they want to influence, or educate, or involve in the process of raising kids, or improving schools, with the result that struggling teachers have more people helping them in the future as a result of what they do.

I'm also trying to show that the responsibility should not rest soley on teachers and parents. Anyone can take on the intermediary role, and draw people from their own network, to information forums like this, and then to schools and neighborhoods where they can volunteer or make donations, or create jobs for parents and youth.

There are departments in universities who are teaching students these skills, and my goal is to recruit those students to apply their talent and their learning toward helping us grow the number and quality of learning resources reaching kids and supporting teachers in high poverty areas.

If we can get a billion page views to our collective web sites then some of them can go to a page where the issue you're talking about can get some broader discussion.