In With the In Crowd?

Dave Shuster, ExploreLearning's founder, shares this bit from a recent EL road trip:

Ted [EL's CEO] and I attended last week a very cool and exclusive event called "The Nation at Risk: Reflecting on Two Decades of Reform". The event was put on by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the J. Paul Getty Trust, and was attended by 60 people in New York.

In attendance were the current Education Secretary, Rod Paige, former Education Secretary (and former S.C. Governor), Richard Riley, former education secretary, Dr. Lauro Cavazos (served under Reagan and Bush 1) along with many other big deal kind of people like Matt Miller who has been writing some very interesting stuff on public education in the Atlantic Monthly, a couple of other former governors (Albert Quie of Minnesota and Tom Keane of N.J.), most of original ten members of the commission that created the report "A Nation at Risk" back in 1983, and various other public sector luminaries such as Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie corporation and former president of Brown University for 16 years and all around big deal in education. Similarly, Barry Munitz, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust and former chancellor of the California State University system …

I actually got to talk a bit with several of the former commissioners and Secretaries Cavazos and Riley, among others. It was pretty cool. We had lunch at a nice Hotel in NY and Dinner at Gracie Mansion!

So how did we get invited? Beats me, but we were the only private sector people there. No MS, no Dell, no Apple, no publishers, no anybody like that. Just two folks from our humble, little ExploreLearning company. I'm amazed all over again as I write this.

I love that last bit about the mystery surrounding the invitation. It's a good omen methinks.