In the wild wonderful (and sometimes tedious) world of education policy in DC, you could spend all of your working and waking hours attending press conferences, forums, hearings and briefings on a dizzying range of education topics. To keep your sanity (and your job) you need to be very selective and attend what seems to be most compelling and makes some meaningful policy sense.

Over the past week I had the very good fortune of making the right choices five straight times. Check out my itinerary:

 “The States' Impact on Federal Education Policy” conference  May 8-9

“Towards 2014: Education Research on the Leading Edge of School Improvement?” policy forum May 13

United Voices for Education meeting  May 14

ED in 08 Bloggers Summit May 15

WestEd’s DC office grand opening reception  May 15

Whew!?! Quite an interesting array of seemingly disconnected gatherings, right? So what’s so compelling about this?  Well, first all there were some pretty important nuggets of wisdom presented at each of these gatherings about fed-state relationships, research and school improvement, civic goals of schools, new media dynamics and Washington-based work. Important stuff in and of themselves … but equally important were the less than apparent interconnections.  Perhaps my imagination was playing tricks on me but I saw a coherent message.  In two sentences let me see if I can connect all the disparate dots:

Establishing a presence both in Washington DC, and in cyberspace is vital to advancing sound research-based education policy at all levels…  Whether advocating for improved academic performance for all students or promoting stronger civic values in our schools, an essential condition of improvement and transformation is building the  capacity for change in terms of knowledge, expertise and political will.   

Make sense?