In spite of the Governor’s veto of the Innovations in Education proposal, IIE hosted their annual conference on Monday and Tuesday, June 7–8, 2004 at the Eastmont Middle School in Sandy. The successful event showcased five of the seven innovative components of the proposal, demonstrated by the respective sub-contractors.

Media attention, nonexistent during the 2004 Legislative session and the subsequent veto, suddenly emerged. A front page article on Monday (the first morning of the conference) by Deseret Morning News was headlined “Odd or not, education plan lives on”. This somewhat critical article was followed two days later on June 9th with an editorial titled “A strange education plan”. Again the News chose to be uncomplimentary of the proposal. Evidently the Deseret Morning News felt the IIE conference was still threatening to public education and took a position against it. (See Deseret Morning News web site for articles).

Fox news ran a segment on their 9PM news Monday evening and the Salt Lake Tribune published a much more favorable article in their Tuesday paper. The sudden news activity resulted in four letters to the editors of two newspapers. (Read letters in pdf).

At the suggestion of John Hughes, the Deseret Morning News Publisher, IIE submitted a 500 word op-ed response to the News editorial. Mr. Hughes was responding to a query from one of IIE's sub-contractors, Jerry Ross. Hughes said:

“All the indications are that this issue is politically dead, but I'd be happy to look at an op-ed piece of about 500 words, without any prior commitment.”

IIE took the opportunity presented by Hughes and forwarded an "op-ed" to the June 9 DMN editorial. As of July 8th, the DMN had not published IIE's response.

Why all the media attention if this issue was politically dead? We wonder what influenced the news to take such a stand when all the previous political action, prior to this issue’s presumed death, went unnoticed???

Had the media representative from DMN attended the complete conference, perhaps subsequent coverage might have echoed a teacher who wrote on her evaluation form:

“Fascinating! I read the Deseret News article on Monday and came to this [conference] ready to turn off my mind to a bunch of bologna. I was wrong. This is cutting edge research with great potential.”

Our mission is to identify and encourage implementation of education innovations that will maximize the impact of education on all our citizens, especially children and improve the effective expenditure of our educational resources.

Innovations in Education accomplishes this by:

	Identifying and evaluating innovations in education, teaching and rehabilitation;
	Encouraging and facilitating out-come based research of educational efforts,
	Encouraging the adoption and ongoing evaluation and use of successful innovations in the public education sector.