• PAA founding members Helen Gym and Karran Harper Royal, along with leader of PAA affiliate Yinzercation, Jesse Ramey, made up the panel on the topic of the Role of Parents in the Advancement of Public Education.
• PAA co-founder Leonie Haimson moderated a discussion on Student Privacy Issues, which included co-founder Julie Woestehoff as a panelist.
• PAA founding member Robin Hiller, NPE's executive director, led a panel on How to Recruit Candidates and Help Them Win Elections, which included successful Seattle school board candidate and PAA founding member Sue Peters.
• Robin also moderated a panel on Opting Out, which featured PAA President Dora Taylor.
• Leonie  and Dora also spoke as part of a panel on Fighting Venture Philanthropy and Astroturf.

Several of these panels were live streamed. Some of the events are already available here.      

Diane and Julian

The NPE conference was a fantastic opportunity to meet up with activists from around the US and to hear from some of our heroes like Karen Lewis, Julian Vasquez Heilig,Texas Superintendent John Kuhn and, of course, Diane Ravitch.   

PAAers were delighted to have dinner with Julian on Friday evening, thanks to arrangements made by our member Lourdes Perez. We talked strategy, learned a lot, and enjoyed the fellowship.

For a terrific recap of the event, read Jesse Ramey's blog post here.

Philly's Diane Ravitch   

There was a nice profile of Helen Gym in the Pennsylvania Gazette, which calls her "Philly's Diane Ravitch." We agree!

Here's a snippet: 

In Gym's view, an "unfettered choice movement," coupled with a funding scheme in which the School District pays charter operators a per-pupil sum that outstrips the savings it can realize, is undermining the very choice most parents want (but few can afford to move to the suburbs to get): a quality neighborhood school that they don't have to win an enrollment lottery to send their kids to, where flavor-of-the-month pilot programs aren't allowed to eclipse the nuts and bolts of a solid education.