The annual conference of the Network for Public Education will take place October 14-15 in Oakland, California. There is space for only 500 people. It is nearly sold out.
Don’t miss your chance to meet your friends and allies from across the country, standing together to support public schools.
Please join us.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oaktown, really? They could have had it in a safer city ya thunk? Why not have it in Stockton or Compton, there a little safer. 🙂
We don’t choose sites based on safety but on need. Oakland has been Eli zbroad’s Petri dish for more than a decade
lol
Oakland is very safe and getting safer! Too safe in some ways, I am a teacher and had to leave after I got my 60% rent increase! Oakland is a wonderful city and it is full of charter schools. There’s no better place for this conference! See you all there!
~Former Oakland teacher and resident
As a proud resident of Oaktown, we hella love Oakland, and I’m sorry, Alphawolf1, if you feel the need to lump it together with Stockton or Compton. Clearly, you have never been here, or you haven’t been here in a very long time. Having the NPE conference here makes total sense. Oakland is a diverse, vibrant, booming city; the downtown features a mix of top notch bars and restaurants, and it boasts a thriving arts scene featuring beautiful art deco movie palaces and entertainment spaces. Check out the Paramount, the Grand Lake, and the restored Fox Theater. The real estate market is through the roof..which is both good and bad, as you can guess. This creeping gentrification is clearly pricing former residents out of their homes here and elsewhere, as evidenced by the large numbers of homeless encampments that have popped up in recent years. Ms. Ravitch is right; Oakland has been a target for privatization for years, and it’s exhausting trying to push back against it all the time. But with the departure of Antwan Wilson and a new home-grown superintendent, there is hope for the future, more than we’ve seen in a long time….Oakland has a strong community presence and understands, along with the NAACP, what these outside reformers are after. In some areas of East Oakland, charters have multiplied like a cancer, with the usual predictable outcomes….school closure, colocations, shedding students they don’t want, and little accountability….
Thank you, OM, very well said. It’s so easy to denigrate a place when you know nothing about it. I feel that way about my northern neighbor Cleveland.
So wish I could join you in Oakland. Prior work commitment precludes it. Maybe next year wherever NPE’s meeting might be.
Wish I could go, too, but I have a good excuse. I’m organizing a volunteer group that is going to do some work projects at my son’s middle school. We have a great group of parents at school that want to help make things better. They are terrific. Always lots to do…
You should invite some NPE attendees over for a field trip. 😊
Terrific. GO! I can’t.