Name
Brett Pawlowski

Hometown
Chicago, IL

Title/Organization
President, DeHavilland Associates

How did you get into education reform?
By accident. I worked for several years in magazine publishing, and joined a company publishing a classroom magazine in 1999 to handle marketing and outreach for their national expansion. We ended up changing our model from publishing to outreach consulting, and that transition afforded me the opportunity to work with an array of businesses and nonprofit organizations to help them design and implement their education outreach initiatives.

What is your proudest moment in this work?
Opening my own firm last year. It has allowed me to devote more of my time to working with businesses and nonprofit organizations interested in getting involved in education, and to invest my time in independent initiatives, such as the Business/Education Partnership Forum, that are helping to give shape to a very fractured industry.

What is your dream for the future of school choice or education?
My dream is that the public – the parents, businesspeople, and community members who fund public education, and who have a vested interest in its outcomes - once again becomes fully engaged in public education. It is their right and their responsibility to take the reins, determining what they want from formal education and how those objectives should be reached.

Your best advice for activists is...
Put business outreach high on your list of your coalition-building priorities. Not only do businesspeople rely on public education to provide capable workers, but they also need an educated public to keep domestic markets strong. The business community can provide substantial resources to further your efforts if you can educate them on the issues, highlight their self-interests, and identify an ROI on their investment in education reform.

Your best advice for parents is...
Don’t abdicate your role as a consumer when it comes to your child’s education. When you buy a car, you take the time to learn about product features, warranties, and safety ratings, and you make an informed decision as to which car is right for you based on these and other factors. Education should be no different: use your consumer skills to learn what constitutes an effective education, and do everything you can to secure that education for your child.

Your best advice for business leaders is...
Recognize that the education industry cannot reform itself: if businesses want a capable workforce and strong markets, it will take involvement on the part of all stakeholders – including businesses – to make that happen. Recognize also that it will take more than money: the experiences and insights you have gained working in the corporate world are both transferable and valuable in the effort to reform education.

What is the one change that needs to be made in education or today's schools?
Making credible, jargon-free information on education available to anyone interested in it.

What was the hardest struggle you faced in this arena?
Coming to terms with the realization that the vast majority of education research is worthless. Much of the research produced either does not meet acceptable research standards or is tainted by the interests or biases of those conducting or funding the research. One example: when the National Reading Panel collected available research on effective reading practices, they discarded 90% of that work as not meeting their standards. Ninety percent!

This is a critical issue in education reform, particularly from the perspective of businesspeople. You cannot make good decisions without reliable data, and its absence in education is a huge barrier to reform.

David Ogilvy, a legend in the advertising field, once said that “most people use research like a drunk man uses a lamppost: for support, rather than for illumination.” Nowhere is that more true than in education.

Who are your heroes?
He’s not a hero necessarily, but I’ve long been inspired by Marshall McLuhan, a brilliant thinker/visionary in the area of media and communications.  Unlike most in his field, he wasn’t interested in studying media as a means of transporting information (i.e., getting a message from point A to point B with minimal interference), but rather of how media altered the lives and perceptions of those it reached. It’s the difference between studying the best way of transporting goods by rail and looking at how the introduction of the railroad changed the lives of people across the country.

If you look at the education industry today, you can see that the vast majority of communication stays within the walls of the industry – our discussions and debates are uniformly internal. In contrast, there are few if any channels that allow for learning and discussion among education’s external stakeholders.

What would happen if we created new avenues for our stakeholders to tap into the information flow and join in the discussion? Would we see an increase in the quality and amount of engagement in education by parents, businesspeople, and other interested parties? That’s one of the big-picture goals of DeHavilland – to build those channels in order to increase understanding and engagement.