I’m not sure the world needs another blogger, but my colleagues here at Thirteen/WNET and WLIW21 have convinced me that the Teaching & Learning Celebration has become so robust and so interesting that there is easily a year’s worth of conversation and contemplation in all that the conference holds. Also, they’ve reminded me that the restrictions of geography and tight budgets means that many more people can be part of this conference through this blog than can ever attend the event itself. With that in mind, here we go!

Why did a public television station create a conference for educators? Why did THIS public television station do it?

There are some high-minded answers to those questions and there are also answers that are purely personal and selfish, although still rooted, I hope, in the greater good. Let me get the latter out of the way first.

Between 1974 and 1990, I was a teacher and school administrator. I started teaching Latin and Greek, and then moved on to 9th grade English when the second school I served didn’t need another instructor in Classics. During that time I attended many education conferences, and since I had nothing to compare them to, I thought they were just fine. Then I went into foundations where I discovered, among other things, that other professions invest a lot more resources and have much higher expectations for conferences than I was used to in education. The same happened when I moved on to public television, where not surprisingly the production values -– and the content –- were incredibly high. The obvious question became: why shouldn’t K-12 educators have the same experience at their professional conferences?

The second epiphany for me when I went to work in the foundation world –- where I spent 12 happy years by the way –- was how much was happening in the world that I knew nothing about. Like many teachers I had gone from school to college to school with no real experience in the world that my students would enter. It was absolutely exhilarating to discover so many compelling opportunities out there beyond teaching, medicine, law, accounting, and business the five areas that had loomed large in my active consciousness. There is a massive non-public sector out there filled with committed, caring people doing an array of interesting things. How I wished –- and still do –- that I had known more about these possibilities when I was a teacher so I could have made connections for my students and with the learning taking place in my classroom and school!

These two realizations -– the assumption that there is no one or no thing in the world too good to be part of an education conference, and that educators ought to get the chance to be exposed to excellence not only in their own profession but as it exists in many domains -– drive both the content and the look-and-feel of the Teaching & Learning Celebration. They are what set the Celebration apart from other conferences. The ideas might have started with me, but since we started planning the first Celebration nearly three years ago, they have been embraced and improved upon by dozens of colleagues here at Thirteen/WNET and WLIW21, and by our hard-working Advisory Committee that represents educators from throughout the Tri-State area. The Celebration is a company-wide effort, which is emblematic of the way public television does everything! Television doesn’t happen without teamwork and massive amounts of collaboration, and there is a built-in give-and-take to everything. That’s the way we create and run the Celebration, too.

So, why public television and why Thirteen and WLIW? Public television is mission driven. (Many people think we’re pledge-drive-driven, but that’s another story.) Our two stations are part of the Educational Broadcasting Corporation. Education IS our business on air, on line, and in communities. Here in New York, public television is chartered by the New York State Board of Regents. We are officially part of what’s called the University of the State of New York. For all of those reasons –- and a good many more -– we are part of the education community and are proud to contribute whatever we can.

New York City also happens to have the nation’s largest school district, and like any cultural institution, we have a special care and concern for our own backyard. For us, that means 1.1 million students, 75,000 teachers and administrators, 1,200 schools -– the scale makes one dizzy. I used to live in Rhode Island, where I liked to say that we had fewer people in the whole state than New York City has students.

New York has a lot to offer, but it’s also an expensive place to do business. We noticed, for example, that the big national-quality education conferences no longer come to New York City, or else come very sporadically. They tend to circulate among the “conference cities” –- Orlando, San Diego, Las Vegas, etc. –- places that have made it attractive for organizations to hold their conferences there. That’s all well and good, but it also means that very few administrators and even fewer teachers from our area ever get to attend these events. We decided that simply wasn’t fair and set out to make sure there was such a conference here so that educators in Metropolitan New York could attend without missing days of schools and incurring large bills for travel, hotel, and food.

But this is what public television always does: we try to meet important needs even though we know the finances will be next to impossible. After all, we’re the people who brought you a multi-part series on String Theory, continue to be the only broadcast media that carries the arts and truly “Great Performances,” and still believe that Americans want to watch real news and current events that matter for the future of humanity. There’s no money to be made when you set out to do these kinds of things, but there is an important difference to be made!

It all takes pledge drives and viewers . . . and educators!!! . . . like you. The work is extremely hard but it does, indeed, make a difference.

Sounds a little like what you do, doesn’t it?

But even though we created the Celebration for the Tri-State area, from the very first conference we’ve been attracting educators from more than 30 states, and we are delighted to open our doors to any educator seeking the best professional development experience any conference can offer!

When our station launched back in 1961, the legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow signed us on by saying, “the only thing this channel will sell is the lure of learning.” That’s a powerful beginning, and it’s a legacy worth holding onto. Even though we do have to “sell” tickets to the Teaching & Learning Celebration, we think we still live up to Ed Murrow’s promise.

Take a look at what this year’s Celebration is bringing you. Dozens of speakers, topped by such luminaries as Jane Goodall, Jean-Michel Cousteau, astronaut Barbara Morgan, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx, Majora Carter, the stars of our hit series “History Detectives” and “Globe Trekkers,” NBC anchor Ann Curry and NewsHour Political Analyst Judy Woodruff, Sudanese refugee and now supermodel Alek Wek. None of these people are educators in the way you are, but they have reached the top of their fields, and you need to know them. There are also luminaries from education -– true icons like Diane Ravitch and Debbie Meier, innovators like Milton Chen, Keith Devlin, Michael John Carley, and Dan Flockhart, and policy leaders like Randi Weingarten, Brenda Welburn, and Marc Tucker. The list is very long! There will be 90 different workshops where you can learn everything from how to use a SMART Board to how to bring the work of Jane Goodall into your class, along with a couple hundred of the most interesting exhibitors we can find.

We focus on science and global awareness, with a heavy dose of math and a through-line of technology integration. And we consciously bring together teachers, administrators and policy makers, elementary, middle, and high school all under one roof because until the profession embraces the interdependence of all these players and layers, it will never be as good as its basic and sacred promise.

We try to do a lot during these two days. We don’t get everything right, but as our advisory team will tell you: we only want to get better and better . . . for you. Join us in this adventure. Join us in this blog. And join us on March 7-8 so you can be part of what one prominent educator has called “the World’s Fair of Education.”