For This Blog, Another Mile Marker

Some time in the last couple of days, this blog hit the 8 million views mark.

I mention this mostly to make one point-- if you wonder whether or not anybody else cares about this stuff, the answer is yes-- a whole bunch of people. It has been one of the most common reactions I've had here-- "I thought I was crazy, that I was the only person who could see what was happening." So, again, I say, you are not.

This blog has connected me with a whole country full of people who care about public education and who are upset about the various assaults upon it, a whole world of people who think education is important and that getting it right really matters. And it's another example of how this whole thing works. The corporate disruptors of education are amplified by money--piles of it. The members of the resistance are amplified by each other--I owe my audience to people who have pushed my writing out into the world. I'm grateful and humbled by the audience that has grown for this blog that started mostly so I could blow off steam.

I once wrote that the resistance meets on weekends, and that's still true. It's also true that most on line "communities" have a shelf life of about two years-- many of the people who were writing and reading when I started are now on to other endeavors. And of course there are those whose gift is activism and activation, who get their work done out on the street. It's a big busy group working in a hundred different ways, and it has been having an effect, shaping the conversation about education and creating a landscape in which casual lying about ed reform is no longer easy (when was the last tie someone tried to tell us that teachers wrote the Common Core). The original reformster approach was to try to have this entire conversation without us--without teachers, parents, supporters of pub lic education. While that still may be the dream for some, it's no longer a possibility.

So for me personally, eight million is another mile marker. But for the support of public education, t's just one more small sign that a bunch of committed individuals have stood in the path of mountains of money aimed at changing the whole premise of education in the US, and we've made a difference. So thank you for being part of this, and thank you for making me a part of this as well.

Now back to work.