Amazing holiday travel experiences, followed by extended recovery from jet lag and a nasty cold I picked up, have kept me from blogging for all of January, but now I am well and ready to express my random thoughts again.

Most of my thoughts right now are ones of hopeful optimism. It’s a new year full of new opportunities. Hooray!

What I am most hopeful and optimistic about is that I think the vicious divisiveness of the education debates may be starting to change. I see indications that some of the education reformers who have allowed their fervent belief in their good intentions to blind them to the damage they have done may be opening their eyes, at least a little.

I am very excited about an undertaking called Education Reimagined. It grew out of work done by an organization called Convergence, which brings together people on opposing sides of important issues to try to solve big problems. In 2013, Convergence brought together 28 people with widely differing views on education to start their process. Over the course of many meetings over two years, the group managed to forge a shared vision, and a few months ago they launched Education Reimagined to promote it.

So far all they have done is put out a few newsletters and a lot of tweets, but I am looking forward to what they will produce in the future. In the meantime, theirs is a pretty great vision, and I recommend checking it out.