My ambition to blog every day for 30 days came to an end yesterday.  I battled a cold for a couple days and yesterday had to attend an all day meeting despite being in the worst of it.  I know, I know, I should have stayed home but this is a once-a-year meeting and it was somewhat essential that I be there in person. (For those of you who might have been with me, I apologize for the hacking and sneezing and only hope I did not infect you.) Once home, blogging, education and technology were the furthest things from my mind.  I cuddled up in comfortable pajamas and fell asleep before 8 PM.

I’m going to blog twice today to make up for it…does that count? This first one is something of a follow up to the last blog post about the VCU blogging community.  There are a few other blogs that I read on a regular basis and I thought I would share one of them with you:

For five years, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier wrote thoughtful letters back and forth as part of the Bridging Differences blog at EdWeek, exploring issues related to education. They began at different ends of the spectrum with Ravitch representing a more conservative viewpoint and Meier a more liberal.  In the end, though, they seemed to have met on the bridge, with Ravitch moving perhaps further along towards Meier’s side as her discomfort with reforms she once espoused like charters and vouchers grew. It was a pleasure to get a peek into the minds of these two women.  Ravitch has moved on to her own blog where she is posting 10-20 items per day (talk about a grand challenge)! And she has become an outspoken advocate for public education.  In her closing post for the Bridging Differences blog, she points out that failing public education is a myth:

Here is something to reflect on: the NAEP scores of students who are black, white, Hispanic, or Asian are at their highest point in history. The proportion of young people between 18-24 who have graduated high school is close to 90 percent, another historical high point. Those who rail about the decline and failure of American education are either misinformed or they obfuscate or prevaricate.

Now, Meier has been joined by Pedro Noguera, sociologist at New York University who studies urban education.  About the same time he came on board, he posted an article in The Nation in which he took issue with the Chicago teachers who were on strike that sparked a response from Diane Ravitch. In his first post for Bridging Differences, he asked Meier to respond as well and she did.

While much of Education Week is behind a pay wall, this blog is freely available.  It provides a chance to get beyond slogans and agendas and think deeply about education.  The commenters also rise about the average and help expand the conversation.