Most read of 2021

And sometimes the blogging happens at 4:30 am...

I don't spend a lot of time on my analytics on here, but once a year, I pulled them up to see what folks have been reading. Here's the top ten list for 2021:

As per usual, the blog itself is, far and away, the most often landed on, meaning that plenty of you stop by here to see what is new. Overall, this year was by far my smallest number of posts ever, which I will endeavor to do better on for the coming year. 

10. Letters to the Board of Ed ahead of yesterday's meeting, from March: These are the letters I wrote to individual members of the Board of Ed back in March when they were considering the guidance for this past fall's return to school.

9. A real "great divide" from October on the Globe continuing to ignore the elephant in the room around which parents have been behind the push to get kids back in buildings, "as normal" without masks and so forth. For the Globe, which terms its education "The Great Divide" to continue to ignore the role of race in this and other issues misses a major issue in Massachusetts education.

8. Switching to a non-pandemic local one, my comments on Worcester's sex ed vote from May is next. I rarely write out what I am going to say in a School Committee meeting, but for this vote, I did. Certainly among the most important votes that we took this term.

7. Every so often, people come across one of my older posts that has photos from a school and clearly start passing it around, and so it was with my 2015 post on Vernon Hill School. Note the WPA-era murals of Native Americans from the lobby. 

6. I spent a long time putting together a response to a student email I received last January on in-school transmission, so I decided to post it for those who might find it useful. Clearly many did!

5. My notes from the March meeting of the Board of Ed, at which they voted to change the time on learning regulations to force schools to have students in buildings full time are next, for obvious reasons. 

4. My length rebuttal to the Atlantic's article pushing for schools to reopen--one of many pieces in which the Atlantic fumbled the issue--is next. I would also note that the Atlantic piece is one of many this year in which the hyperlinks don't tell the story the text claims.

3. My February letter to the Worcester delegation, pleading with them to act as a co-equal branch of government--something, I'd note, we could still use--is next. I continue to think this:

 Had we started our response there--with Worcester, with Chelsea, with Lawrence--we would have had a very different result. 

And yet, of course, here we are.

2. Something we haven't seen in some time is a charter school application for Worcester; we had one this year (which didn't get sent forward to the next step), and that blog post is next. This is, I think, something which is not going to go away quietly in the coming years, so Worcester needs to be ready for it. 

1. And topping the most read individual posts is my March letter to the delegation questioning the Commissioner's authority, something which I have yet to hear anyone at the state level do. I think that coming out of this era, one of the things with which we need to wrestle is the question of who has what job. The model of everything being left to the local level except when the state decides it doesn't like what you're doing is not a good one. 

And on into 2022! Thanks for reading!