The unbearable lateness of blogging

A commenter posted this question this weekend:

are you ever going to post on a regular schedule or is this blog dead? it had/has such high hopes.

I started this blog because I wanted to contribute to the great debate on education, specifically to promote discussion of the relationship between the public and the public schools. I think that goal is more important than ever, and I can’t claim to have succeeded there by any stretch of the imagination, so you would assume that I’d redouble my efforts – or at least keep at it at a reasonable pace.

But there’s more than one way to affect the conversation. Blogging is one way, and indeed it was the only channel open to me when I first started my company back in 2005. But that’s no longer true: since that time we’ve created the Business/Education Partnership Forum, which has a monthly newsletter; we held a national conference, bringing together more than 150 people to share thoughts and experiences; we’ve launched a webinar series on building community/school partnerships; and our latest move – not even announced publicly yet – is to publish a new subscription-based newsletter on the subject called the K12 Partnership Report.

So we’ve found other ways to advance the discussion, although admittedly these are mostly industry initiatives as opposed to public outreach efforts, and I do believe the subject of community/school relationships needs to be highlighted and considered among public stakeholders. So there’s certainly an argument to be made for rededicating my blogging efforts.

But the counterargument is just as compelling, and it comes down to a limitation of resources, in my case primarily time. DeHavilland is a small company, and we have many commitments: we’re serving several individual clients on a consulting basis, we’re managing the Forum and other current initiatives (like our webinars), I’ve been speaking more and more lately, and we’re in the launch phase for a new newsletter. So time is a precious commodity, and even though I’ve got a number of things that I want to cover through the blog, I rarely seem to find the time I need to do research and write on them in a thoughtful way.

For now, I’m still committed to the blog, even though posts may be few and far between. Starting in January, I may supplement posts with the occasional article from our new newsletter, since they’re on-point, but I still would like to offer more thought/opinion content than the practical nature of the articles from KPR.

So to sum up, I suppose my response to the commenter’s question is… I’m still here – and I’m still trying to get more posts up. Bear with me :-)