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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Diane Ravitch visits Sacramento and Linda Darling-Hammond finds her voice…

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Diane Ravitch visits Sacramento and Linda Darling-Hammond finds her voice…:

Diane Ravitch visits Sacramento and Linda Darling-Hammond finds her voice…

Schott Foundation for Public Education training 2010
This post is more a personal reflection of Diane Ravitch’s recent speaking engagement in my town and my own personal analysis. For a more comprehensive look at that event, look here. I’ll be adding more posts at http://sacteachers.org/ over the next few days. These views are my own opinion, not the union’s, etc.

Diane Ravitch was everything you’d want her to be, but for my money, Linda Darling-Hammond has come to be much more than I expected. What do I mean by this? If you’ve been following the ed “reform” discussion online for a while, as I have, you know a lot of what Diane Ravitch is going to say because we all pass around her bon mots and tweets. She has a great delivery, and I am pleased and proud to have seen her in person, but Darling-Hammond was and has become a more surprising advocate for real education reform. While Ravitch has been


Behind the curtain at Diane Ravitch in Sacramento

Set up

This post is more a personal behind the scenes reflection of Diane Ravitch’s recent speaking engagement in my town. For a more comprehensive look at that event, look here. I’ll be adding more posts at http://sacteachers.org/ over the next few days.

Part of mi vida loca lately has been taking over social media duties for my union local. Complicating my union work further, we are having our contract “opened” on wages and benefits, and there were threats to bring TFA to our district (now quashed, thankfully). Just to make life exciting, I’m doing this while teaching full-time, and I also suffered through stomach flu, and one of the worst sinus allergy attacks of my life since coming back from Winter Break.

The capstone to the last few weeks, heck to the last month or two, was a visit from education historian and commentator Diane Ravitch, in an event to which SCTA (my union local) was the main sponsor and organizer. Needless to say, when you are having the Queen of Education Twitterers visiting , you want a robust social