Post-Mortem II: It’s a Marketing Problem

Was NCLB reauthorization a victim of poor marketing?

Eduflackseems to think that’s the reason an education reform “that works” got jammed up in Congress. He offers an “early outline of what an NCLB marketing plan needs to focus on” for another try at getting the law revised and renewed — with such steps as goal setting, message development, and audience identification and segmentation.

Eduflack give NEA and AFT props for running the better communications campaign this time around, and advises ED to get some communications professionals in a room for a day to hammer out “a blueprint for selling NCLB across the nation.”

“Just like the law itself, an NCLB communications plan needs goals,” he writes.  “It needs methods of measurement.  It needs feedback loops.  It needs highly qualified professionals.  It needs accountability.”

If it really was just a matter of marketing — and not serious flaws in the law — that foiled reauthorization, then let’s heed Henry Ford, who famously said, ”A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.”

Explore posts in the same categories: reauthorization