Tuesday, September 11, 2012

We Bridged Our Differences - Bridging Differences - Education Week

We Bridged Our Differences - Bridging Differences - Education Week:


We Bridged Our Differences

Dear Deborah,
We started this weekly exchange of letters more than five years ago, to what must have been the shock and amusement of those who knew both of us. We were supposed to be at opposite poles of the education debates of the day, so there was a certain logic to the idea that we might engage in "Bridging Differences."
I remember when we first began this journey. In the fall of 2006, we were invited by New York University to discuss the changes in the New York City public schools. We met for lunch to talk about what we would say. We surprised each other as we learned that we were both appalled by the heavy-handed, ham-handed manner in which ill-considered accountability measures were imposed on the schools. We each had our list of grievances, and we resolved to write an article together.
The writing process took some weeks, as drafts went back and forth between us. I had to learn to cope with your unique approach to orthography. When the article was finished, it was published in Education Week. Some