Last week the Bill and Melinda Gates and the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundations announced a $60 million campaign, Ed 08, to put public education at the center of issues debated in presidential election cycle. Ed 08 is intended to “ensure that the nation engages in a rigorous debate and to make education a top priority in the 2008 presidential election.” It is a big, bold goal just like the kind they talk about in business books. But, based on a very early assessment, it seems to me that Ed 08 is not headed for Harvard Business School, but headed straight for hell. Here’s why.

Ed 08 has all of the best intentions. It oozes sincerity and is well-meaning, but even those good intentions can’t save it from itself.

All campaigns, whether they are attempts to organize and mobilize people to advocate for an issue or vote for a candidate, have three core components: brains (leadership, purpose, message, policy positions), brawn (website, printed materials), and beliefs (open or closed, bottom up or top down, establishment or insurgent.)

Intellectually, Ed 08 is on solid footing. Roy Rohmer, the chair of the board, (although who the other board members are is a mystery) is a former Congressman and Superintendent of LA Schools and is fantastically well qualified to lead the braintrust.

The confounding part of “Ed” is it is a campaign without any people. The brawn is pretty scrawny, it has a campaign website that, aside from one blog, looks like it’s from 1999 and has seemed to miss the entire revolution in social networks that has powered grassroots activism for the past several years. According to an insider I spoke to, the foundation spared no expense on consultants in developing the campaign (maybe it’s not all that different from a traditional campaign after all!) but one hopes that they didn’t spent a big chunk of that on the website.

The Ed 08 website is a 21st century ghost town – with Roy Rohmer as Smitty the Deputy Sheriff looking to run someone in for an infraction of the education policy – only no one’s in town anymore. Why isn’t there a board of directors, or at least a list of advisors and supporters? Are the foundations constitutionally opposed to a blog roll, afraid that someone might leave the site?

In stereotypical Web 1.0 fashion, the tabs on the top of the home page read: About Us, Latest News, Issues, Get the Facts, Participate. Click on “Participate” and you will find four ways to engage: you can give them your email address to receive updates, or you can give them your email address to join Ed, or my favorite, you can give them your family’s and best friends email address to help spread the word. Finally you can “show your support” by adding an “Ed 08” badge to your website or blog – in order to send people to the site to give away their email addresses.

There is a planned online community for the site. Click on “Create a Profile”, and guess what, you’re asked to give your email address!

We are asked to sign up with our email addresses on all campaign sites. It just isn’t the only thing we’re asked to do on the better sites now. Ed ’08 looks like a site in a world where YouTube and MySpace doesn’t exist. No video of any kind, no links to other sites. If this was a candidates’ site it might be reasoned that they were forced to launch, like Obama, before they were ready because of the primary season and fundraising pressures. There is no such pressure on Ed 08 – honestly the world could have waited a few more weeks for Gates to tell us what we should think about public education – because what I think certainly doesn’t seem to be a priority.

Public education is, of course, critically important to our success as a nation. The site is overflowing with guidelines and policy briefing papers about its dismal state. The site admits that education is primarily a state and local issue, which speaks to the larger question of whether a campaign to influence the presidential campaigns is a good idea. Is a presidential race really the best vehicle for talking about education reform?

The answer is a resounding yes. President Bush is not on the ballot in ‘08 but his debacles certainly are. The campaign agenda, so far, is all Iraq all the time. A strong case can be made the improving our public education system is an issue of national security. These foundations have the means to help change the agenda; they simply can’t do it by checkbook alone.

Ed ’08 is largely a product of a fictitious place called foundation world. In this world, where financial bottom lines exist, foundations complain about too many nonprofits asking for funds while at the same time they start their own foundation initiatives as if no one else is qualified or better positioned to be successful. There are many outstanding advocacy organizations, such as the Institute for Educational Leadership, The Institute for Research and Reform in Education, National Council of LaRaza, the Center for Teacher Leadership. The list goes on and on, and literally it goes on the Gates Foundation website highlighting the work of it’s own grantees. Why aren’t these groups leading Ed 08? Ed 08 is not a partisan campaign, it would not compromise anyone’s tax exempt status, and these organizations already have constituencies, and capacity for advocacy. One of the keys of network strategies is going where people are. No one is at Ed 08 – at least not yet – but plenty of people are on LaRaza, and MySpace and Facebook and Care2 and MomsRising.

Based on the public face of Ed so far, the bottom line is that the bottom line could have been saved a huge hit by putting up a MySpace page with Roy’s blog and links to the groups named above. Campaigns, like people, can and should evolve and mature over time. Ed 08 has time to find it’s footing, but it needs to be powered by people not just dollars to succeed.