DFER's third anniversary

It's hard to believe it, but Democrats for Education Reform is only three years old.  Below is a letter from Joe Williams on our third anniversary, and here are some excerpts:

 

Dear friend:

Three years ago today we stood in New York City and birthed a bouncing baby political advocacy organization called Democrats for Education Reform.

In an incredible 36-month stretch, you have helped us:

-- Direct more than $17 million into political and grassroots advocacy for education reform, creating momentum which has the potential to dominate education policymaking for years to come.

-- Play a leading role in efforts to pass groundbreaking K-12 reform-centered legislation in multiple states, including New York, Colorado, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Florida.

-- Lead efforts to frame the fight that is playing out within the Democratic Party on education issues. This successful framing has cleared the way for significant reform efforts stemming from the Obama administration, and filtering down into states all across the map.

-- Establish active DFER outposts in Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Colorado.  New outposts are in the process of forming in Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Oregon, Washington, California, and elsewhere. The effort to spread the reform blanket across as much of the map as possible is done in recognition of the reality that change must be pushed at all levels and all across the map in order to make the most of the current opportunity for reform.

-- Emerge as THE "go-to" voice for the education reform wing of the Democratic Party in press accounts, helping us level the political playing field for reform. Our activists and experts have been quoted in hundreds of mainstream news stories, including regularly in such publications as The New York Times,  Wall Street Journal, Washington Post,  Newsweek, and Education Week. Our voices can be heard regularly on national radio broadcasts, and our envelope-pushing op-eds have appeared in newspapers from coast-to-coast.

-- Assume a leading role (more than any other advocacy group) in pushing the unprecedented "Race To The Top" reform contest on all levels– fighting hard for more than a year to keep the bar raised at the federal level and then, in states, to help clear the bar in as many state capitols as possible.

And so much more.

Just three years ago, today's conventional wisdom (that the political tide is beginning to turn in favor of reform) would have been laughable. Trust me, I heard the laughs and saw the eyes roll in state after state when I told people what we were trying to do. Good luck with that, they told us.

I took this job after a 15-year-career in daily newspaper journalism, and I've learned an awful lot in the 1,095 days of baptism by fire.   One of the most important things I have learned is that winning in the policy advocacy arena requires an all hands on deck approach.  While we have accomplished some great things since our launch, we can move the needle even more profoundly in the coming years with broad based support from all types of people, starting with the folks on this incredible (and rapidly growing) email list.

Please help us continue our work – and in turn, send an official endorsement of the need for better political conditions to support K-12 education reform – by contributing today to our political action committee. Contributions are not tax-deductible, but as we've shown in the last three years, they can go a long way toward impacting meaningful change for our public schools.

On the night we officially launched DFER in 2007, I urged the crowd gathered on the balcony of one our founders' apartments to help us begin the process of shutting down the organization we were birthing that night; to help us make an organization like Democrats for Education Reform significantly less oxymoronic than it was at the time. I am proud and pleased to report to you that after three years, we're closer to that day than I ever imagined. But we all know we still have a lot of work to do.