This evening there was a public forum with the first of three superintendant candidates. He hit all the right notes and demonstrated great energy and understanding of the community. My only comment was that he didn't use a language of student empowerment. He talked about using multiple measures and about student feelings of success and students being engaged in meaningful tasks (meaning he talked all around it), but he didn't talk about students having power or control over their circumstances. There was a clear focus on creating a positive environment for children with little comment on how children could be empowered to construct that environment for themselves. To be fair, he probably could have waxed eloquent on this topic too, but perhaps wasn't given the right opportunity. In any case, he seemed like he would be a great superintendant.
I found out today that the Letter to the Editor I wrote a few days ago has been published by the Amherst Bulletin. Alisa tells me it has a reasonable title and looks good. It is also posted in the 
Not This Charter Wiki. The Not This Charter Website finally went live a day or two ago. The folks who've been working on it, put in a lot of effort to try to reach concensus (or at least non-disagreement) before taking the site public. By putting links to it here, it will probably get crawled by google within a few days.
As I was looking at our governor's proposed budget, I realized that our state is having to cut education and services at the same time the country is planning to spend billions of dollars to fight a war in Iraq. They're currently projecting that we'll spend about $100 billion for the war and another $100 billion to rebuild afterwards. They're giving $24 in "grants and loan guarantees" to Turkey alone. I'll bet Massachusetts would be willing to have the American troops based here for way less. I'd be willing to let them base their troops at my house for just tens of millions of dollars.