Editor’s Letter: Goobye, Peggy

By John P. Ourand

I remember the first time I met Peggy O'Brien, who is leaving Cable in the Classroom this month after a successful three-year stint.

It was May 2001, and she had just been named executive director of Cable in the Classroom, a nice, little organization of do-gooders that had always seemed lightweight to me. I thought I'd be

conducting a boilerplate interview that would cover O'Brien's past credentials and future plans for the organization.

The interview was anything but standard. The personable O'Brien spoke openly about challenges (something you don't hear from most executives) and admitted that there was a lot to learn about the industry.

And then she started asking me for my opinions. Now, I don't know much about public affairs. And I know even less about education. That didn't stop her from asking for--and listening to--to my ill-informed ideas about how Cable in the Classroom should be reconfigured.

That back-and-forth told me a lot about O'Brien's style. By her own account, she conducted hundreds of interviews that summer to find out how people inside and outside the industry viewed Cable in the Classroom and how they thought it should evolve.

O'Brien also brought the ability to think outside the box. When Steve Effros suggested that Cable in the Classroom focused too much on teachers and not enough on the parents who pay the cable bills--a novel concept at the time--O'Brien listened, thought, then acted.

"Even education, which is as ramrod and inflexible and immovable as any damn thing on Earth as an institution, realizes that there's a whole lot of learning that doesn't go on in the classroom," O'Brien says. "One of the reasons so many people have talked to us about changing the name of the organization is that if the focus is still on the classroom, then you are missing all these opportunities."

To that end, O'Brien praised Comcast's current ad campaign: "Learning happens everywhere." The campaign talks about the benefits of high-speed access for students, and it recommends using networks that are good for kids, such as C-SPAN and CNN, to follow the election.

"Comcast has made a strategic decision. They continue to be in schools, but their focus has expanded way into the homes," O'Brien says. "Cox is the same way. So is Cablevision. Parents are a lot more involved now.

"This organization was founded to be aimed at teachers in classrooms," she continues. "This organization now is challenged to break out of that. It's a challenge to get the industry to see that it needs to break out of that."

I expect Cable in the Classroom will continue to push that forward-thinking agenda after O'Brien leaves to become SVP, educational programming and services at PBS. And I expect PBS will become a more formidable network in the coming years.