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A Message from CER Chairman Jon Hage

Dear Friend,

I’m excited to be attached to this amazing organization, which since 1993 has been demanding and ensuring the proliferation of freedom, flexibility and innovation in U.S. schools.

After having written Florida’s first charter school law, I put policy into practice. My first charter school was a municipal partnership, my next a workplace effort, and soon Charter Schools USA was supporting families and citizens who sought entrepreneurs to help them create personalized, exceptional learning environments for their students.

CER was for us the first, most resolute advocate for lasting, substantive and structural change in U.S. education, and I am proud now to serve as its Chair. The Center was founded with a simple, but ambitious, guiding principle: to restore excellence to education by bridging the gap between policy and practice such that great ideas are put into action. Its leaders helped introduce the first school choice laws and cultivated a new generation of advocates who spearheaded change in their own states and communities.

I know. I am one of those advocates, and I can speak firsthand to the direct impact CER has had on creating the policy environments necessary for expanding choice and creating change. And because CER finds, cultivates and cuts the learning curve in half for interested citizens, I am proud today to help lead a multi-pronged statewide coalition of charter and choice schools that is improving opportunities for students throughout the U.S. 70,000 students attending 77 CSUSA schools are benefitting in some way from the Center’s work, adding to the countless others who’ve achieved and gone on from schools of choice across the nation.

You see, the Center is an organization of action and results. We have had a direct impact on laws in over 30 states. We have reviewed, vetted, and analyzed the research from thousands of sources and have provided accurate, succinct and actionable reports to policymakers and parents to ensure cutting edge relevance and efficacy.

Take a look at what an organization that once-Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter called “a small, spunky organization” has done to create an education reform movement that is rooted in opportunity and educational equality for all. Then, consider how far we still have to go to achieve that goal for everyone. We can’t do it without you. To that end, I humbly ask your financial support of the Center, and your partnership.

I invite you to join our fight to make all schools great, for all children.

Sincerely,

Jon Hage, Founder and CEO, Charter Schools USA